I have been in EMS since 1989 when I became an EMT (a paramedic in 1993). While I have been a preceptor for almost ten years, I have rarely done any traditional teaching such as CPR or EMT classes of ACLS. I love one on one teaching, but I don’t like standing in front of a group of uninterested students, and also at least early on in my career, I felt, for right or wrong reasons, I needed more time in the street to build up a certain street credibility before I could confidently teach.
In the last couple years I have taught a couple special classes of the new American Heart updates and on capnography. In both classes I made my own Power Points and did quite a bit of research. The classes went over well I believe because I had a certain passion for the material, and I think there was new information for the students so they would leave feeling like they had learned something.
I love the street, and I hope that I will be able to be a fulltime field medic until my middle sixties – another twenty years. But recently I have felt some of the effects of age – increased stiffness at times, I’m not as spry jumping in and out of the back of the ambulance, and when I get sick as I am now with a bad chest cold, I just feel old and weary and like I might be coming to the end of the line. In the last couple years I have worked about sixty hours a week, sometimes up to eighty. I know I won’t be able to continue that pace for another twenty years.
That was one of the reasons I signed up to take the ACLS Instructors class. Maybe now instead of doing a shift hauling people up and down stairs, I can get paid for teaching in a classroom where the most I have to lift is pen to sign the student’s check off sheets. But I do want more than just a break from the street, and I would like to do more than just lift a pen to sign a check off sheet. I would like to be a good teacher, one who can convey my own love for the work to others.
The Instructors class is a two day class, but if you take the new AHA Instructor’s Core Class on-line or on CD-ROM(I did this on Monday in between calls), you only have to take a one day class going over the 10 ACLS Core Cases. This is the class I took yesterday. It wasn’t too different from the regular ACLS class. We covered the same material, but our sessions were sprinkled with information about how to teach the sessions.
I’ve been taking PALS and ACLS every other year for over ten years now, and I often find that many classes have the “you know the material, but we just have to do this, because its required” attitude. But sometimes, I get an instructor who challenges you and teaches you something new. I had this yesterday in one of the instructors, who is also a longtime medic, but one who many years ago moved into more or less full-time teaching/supervising education, relegating his field time to one shift a week.
When we left his class, one of the students said to another “I learned something there.” The other said, “He’s very much knowledgeable.”
That’s the kind of teacher I want to be.
