become a surgeon – and that he began at that point to become one. Well, dear
reader, nothing like that happened to me. Life happened to me.
I’m going to tell you a little bit about the path that brought me here and the
wonderful people who gave me tips along the way. You’ve got to listen to people.
You’ve got to prepare and work hard and take advantage of opportunities. And
when the door opens, go through. Run through. Don’t wait until it closes. No,
no, no, no, you’ve got to go through while it’s wide open.
I was born into a poor rural family – a farm family of Scotch-Irish people very
strong in their values. They worked hard on the land. They did not tolerate foolishness
spoken by the children. You learned to keep your mouth shut unless you
had something to say, and that was a good thing to teach a child.
My mother drilled into my head that I was going to college, because she never
got that opportunity. My dad was on the other side, telling me that he couldn’t
afford to send me to college. And I said to myself: “He doesn’t have to send me
to college. I’m going to work my way through.”
In the 1950s, a woman had two career choices: You could be a nurse or you
could teach. Nursing was out for me, because the very idea of seeing blood and
internal organs just turned my stomach. Yes, that’s an odd thing for a woman
involved in creating the College of Medicine to say, but it’s the truth. I’m married
to a surgeon, so I guess I’ve gotten over it to some extent. But teaching was
the thing I was always interested in. I taught little children in Sunday school and
vacation Bible school. I taught piano lessons even when I was 10 years old – for
25 cents a lesson. So I was teaching even when I was a small child.
I got a degree in teaching and taught in college. I taught other kids how to teach,
and I went off to teach kids biology when I graduated. I was, I must say, a pretty
good teacher. I taught high school in mountainous North Arkansas for 10 years.
(Unfortunately I was married to the wrong person, but I had a wonderful child, my
son Paul.) I taught many kids from very poor families, and they were smart as they
could be. You could give them a sophisticated scientific problem, put a group of
them together and it was amazing how quickly they could solve it. I thought, “My
God, we should have these kids in Washington. They could be solving some of our
country’s biggest problems.” They taught me everything I needed to know for the rest
of my life. They taught me how to handle difficult people. How to be a good parent.
How to run, basically, my division in med school. How to tell which people would
be good employees. They taught me everything. I’ve started a number of initiatives
here at the med school to help kids like that. We need their help to diversify our professions
and to give us their perspectives on the many problems in our society today.
They were lovely kids, who accepted me – this blonde-haired twit from southern
Arkansas – and tolerated me as much as I tolerated them. (My students once said this
about me to a visitor: “She looks normal – but she’s not” – because I was known for
doing the unexpected.) They let me teach them and they didn’t gladly learn. Which
I loved.
During those 10 years, I was asked to come back to the teachers college I graduated
from and teach the teacher interns. They wanted me to show them the experimental
approach to teaching biology. I got involved in the National Science Foundation and
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