When you qualify, especially if you're in a teaching hospital environment, you really start teaching as a houseman in a small way, and then more and more as you go along. And then when you become more senior it's a combination of the ordinary ward round teaching and lectures and seminars and all the usual sort of stuff, and it's always struck me as rather paradoxical that, in actual fact, my generation, we've never been taught anything about teaching. And I think, although a lot of it is, you know, some people can and some people can't and some people like it, which I do, and some people don't, I think the... the trend now to do a bit of teaching about teaching is a very good one because clearly, if you don't know you're making mistakes you'll go on making the same mistakes and as you get older, more senior, people are obviously less inclined to tell you, 'By the way, professor, you... this is absolutely not the way to do it'. And I think it would be – I suppose it is now that people are taught about teaching, but I think it would be very beneficial if it was more general and particularly because there's so many medical students. They're all over the place. They're sent here, there and everywhere, where decades ago there wouldn't be any teaching going on, but now there is. So I think, I think it is very useful and I think I said before that involving the patient in teaching is not just okay, it's positively beneficial to everybody, if the patient agrees with it, because the student likes to be taught with some real person there and the... and it feels more real really, it's more valid. The lecturing side of things, that's a bit more dodgy because a lot of people don't find lectures at all useful and lecturers, again, like other kinds of teaching vary so much in whether they grab people or they don't. But actually I do think, although I can't remember what they were about, but I do think that I have learnt a great deal from good lectures. I think it gives you a sort of, a sort of glue about the subject, which other things stick onto in a way. So I think there's a lot of teaching that could be going on better than it, it is now. Yeah, I mean, I think that's really what I wanted to say about it.
