Me and House

I love the TV show HOUSE for a lot of reasons. First, I'm a total science geek and a mystery lover, so what could be better than a show where they are trying to figure out the mystery illness. Second, I love Hugh Laurie. Even as the cantankerous, unshaved House, he's hot.

But, this is a voice blog so perhaps I should move on to why teaching voice is like being a doctor on HOUSE. Many years ago, someone told me that if I couldn't immediately identify and fix a student's vocal problem that I shouldn't be a teacher. I used to think the same thing about doctors--they should add up all the symptoms, immediately come to a diagnosis, and recommend the treatment that would fix it. Obviously, that isn't the case on HOUSE. If it was, the show would only take 5 minutes. The problems for both doctors and voice teachers are that
1. We don't always know all the symptoms. We try to ask the right questions and make the right observations, but sometimes a patient/student doesn't tell us something because they don't think it is important, but it's the one thing that might help us make a definitive diagnosis.
2. Often, similar symptoms can have very different causes. Even a grouping of 3 or 4 symptoms might still give us multiple options for diagnosis.
3. Since each body is different, we have to tailor the treatment for each individual. My mom and my dad react very differently to pain medications. My mom can usually only handle a half dose of the mild stuff. My dad needs the heavy duty drugs and quite a bit of them. As much as I hate it, and as bad as it is for my voice, sometimes the only thing that will help a student open enough is to tell them to imagine a grapefruit in their throat.

Today, we spent most of one lesson struggling with the same concept. As I teacher, there is part of me that gets frustrated with this and I start to doubt myself. Sometimes, ok most of the time, the kids also get frustrated. I'm so glad that my student tonight was so flexible that she didn't get frustrated. We just kept trying different things until we found something that worked. And she sounded great at the end of the lesson. I was able to diagnose and treat this "patient" within her half hour "episode". I wish it was always like that. Unfortunately in real life, things often take longer. I just need to remember to be patient with the process.

-- Posted from my iPhone