It Can Be Done

It has got to start with a lot of love.

To make a positive impact on this world has been an advocacy of mine, something I wish to accomplish everyday I am conscious about it. LOL.

To be honest, there has never been a time when I felt I was too little to make a change, or too small to leave a mark. It is simple really – I believe that even the smallest, most random acts can change the course of life; after all, when you add a pile of small good things, the end result has got to only be best big things.

Like today, Ma’am PM was back teaching, but this time on the clinical setting. I had my first day of duty as a nurse clinical instructor for the university at a local primary hospital. My students were also sophomores but coming from a different campus. I handled two groups, 22 students all in all, who were also having their first time of clinical exposure as student nurses.

I have only left the nursing academe two years ago, after graduating as a part of class 2007-2008, so it is a fact that how it feels to be a student nurse is not very far from my memory, no matter how much short-circuit it seems to be sometimes. I can perfectly recall how it felt like, to be wearing that hospital uniform, excited and anxious at the same time, eager and fearful all at once.

It did not help that some of the clinical instructors I had certainly had no clue about teaching. Basically, a typical clinical instructor is someone to be feared, someone who is a foe, and it seems, is someone who has made it his or her life’s mission to embarrass you in public.

If it was any consolation, if not for the weird teaching principles and methods I received when I was in college, I would not be a teacher now, with a certificate on professional education I earned just last March. Also, because of all the horrible things I’ve seen, I have made it my mission to be a better clinical instructor – way better.

I made sure I related to my students, made sure that they saw me as a teacher and not as a three-headed monster. I ensured that they were learning and that the learning experience was both fruitful and fun, and more importantly, that it improved their confidence, not only in doing things right, but in being brave enough to try. After all, the essence of nursing is supposed to be caring.

Back in college, I would often hear instructors say that if they would not be mean the student nurses would not follow or would not learn. You know what, I never believed one bit of it then, and with what I’ve seen in my students, certainly more so not now.

It was heart warming, how they evaluated their first day of duty with me, telling me that they learned so much, and that they had so much fun actually working. Seeing their faces, I could not compare mine, nor my groups mates’ then, with how we concluded ours.

My students learned; more than that, they were happy.

But of course, I was happier.