As a medical resident, Mike was very good at teaching. He really had a knack for it. Part of it was his intellectual personality. He enjoyed passing on his knowledge and experience and did it in a low pressure, non-judgemental way. He didn't try to intimidate students with high pressure quizzing like many other people do in medicine. The other reason he was a good teacher was his thought process. As mentioned many times before, Mike was all about organization. While he might not have had every random, minute detail memorized, he had an organized approach to everything that counted. That made it easy to learn and remember. I was always very envious of how easily he could break down something complicated into manageable parts.
I was reminded of Mike while working in the operating room last week. I had a medical student with me for the day. When we had a little down time I was going over with him how to interpret an ECG. As I was going through the approach, I remembered having the exact same conversation with Mike when I was a medical student. It was an evening when we were oncall together at KGH. I can still remember sitting with him in a dimly lit nursing station, late at night as he helped me work through interpreting ECG's. I obviously never forgot that conversation. Evident that Mike could work with even the worst students.
Tom
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