Teach

Although Robert Frank mentioned that his method of teaching economics to undergraduates came from the narrative theory of learning, he outlined another more impressive method in his book.

The idea is simple. Take learning a foreign language as the example: You can never learn, say, Spanish, if you only had a series of lectures on Spanish words and grammar. In contrast, you could master it rather quickly if you hear a few simple Spanish sentences (preferably directly related to your daily life), try to repeat them yourself, and then expand and extrapolate to other sentences.

I'm sure the same argument also holds for medical education.

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As to learning a foreign language, I have a specific personal experience.

When I was newly graduated from medical school some twenty years ago, there were a lot of Vietnam boat people in Hong Kong, and they accounted for a substantial portion of our workload in public hospitals. Although we had no formal teaching on speaking Vietnamese, almost all of us, after working in the ward for a few weeks, could speak at least a few broken sentences.

And, after this historical legacy disappeared since 1997, I had no chance to practice and had forgotten almost all.

Well, maybe except two phrases: lie down and put down your pants.

I said them for thousands of times in the obstetric ward.