The AMTA Council of Schools presents an award each year to an instructor in an AMTA member school who demonstrates exceptional teaching abilities and commitment to high standards of education in massage therapy. This award honors the memory of Jerome Perlinski, an extraordinary educator and much loved Council leader.

In January 2005, I was selected to receive the Teacher of the Year Award, based on an application submitted without my knowledge by my friends, students, and colleagues at the Myotherapy College of Utah. Here is what a few of the letters in the application had to say:

"Her outstanding teaching methods are entertaining, imaginative, and artistic, creating a fun and stimulating learning environment. I have never come across a more dedicated and enthusiastic teacher than Ruth in any of my schooling, including nursing school and three major universities."

"Supporting the students in learning that they can do more than they thought is exactly what being a teacher is all about."

"Ruth gave new meaning to the use of a dry-erase board."

"Above all, Ruth is a woman of high integrity. She has no fear of saying who she is and being who she says she is. Truly a model for massage therapists in the profession, she fights for the uphill trends in education and in professionalism in the field."

thanks, guys.

RW

Teacher of the Year 2005 Award Speech:

I can’t tell you how proud I am to be here: how honored, and how humbled, to be recognized by a group of people who, as massage educators, clearly have the best job in the entire world. I am especially touched to welcome my sister and brother, who have come from Virginia to share this morning with me. I got the news that I would receive this award last January. They told me that this position doesn’t hold a lot of responsibility; all I’d have to do is give this speech today. I just want to warn you, I’ve had eight months to work on this. Settle in—this could be a long morning.

In the school I work at in Utah, we have a graduation five times every year. In fact, we have one tonight. I’m missing it because I am here. I go to every graduation that I can, because it’s really a critical rite of passage, and it’s important to mark that with some ceremony. And I am occasionally invited to other schools’ graduations as well. This means I listen to maybe six or seven commencement or motivational speeches every year—sometimes I myself am the speaker. Most of the speeches I hear—and give— are pretty predictable: find your passion. Clarify your vision. Know what you want, so you can recognize it when it drops into your lap. Take good care of yourself. Do what you love. Leave the world a better place than you found it. I keep listening to hear something—anything, that might change the way I think a little, or give me a new idea, or challenge my world-view, but those moments are few and far between. Really, most speeches are given to validate all the things we already know. This is valuable; we all love to be validated, but I am hoping to go a little further. After the last graduation I attended, a new idea finally crept into my head, and I’m excited to share it with you.

To set this up, I have to share with you a little of my background, with a special emphasis on my many wrong turns. I am the daughter of a public school teacher. My mother raised four children as a single parent in the 1960s and 70s on a teacher’s salary. I have grown up with respect, even reverence for the role of the educator, and when I went to college, I chose a school that offered a 5-year program to earn a Bachelor’s and a Master of Arts Degree in Education, so that I could follow in my mother’s footsteps. Well, that program disintegrated about halfway through my sophomore year. I hit a dead end. I was faced with the choice of transferring to another college, or staying where I was. So I made the obvious decision: I became a theatre major. This turned out to be a good thing, because I discovered much later that while I deal with children all right in small doses, whole classrooms full of them drive me right up the wall.

I graduated from college in 1982 with an interdisciplinary BA in theatre/literature, and moved to Seattle, where the plan was that I was going to turn the town upside down. That plan didn’t work out so well, either. While I found lots of theatre companies that needed my help, and I had many opportunities to expand my skills as an actor, a writer, a director, and a technician, I had more trouble finding people willing to pay me for the work. It didn’t take long to figure out that this would never be a viable career path for me. I had hit another dead end.

So there I was, one afternoon, at the house where I was a nanny for two little girls. I was having a cup of coffee, waiting for them to get home from school, and wondering what I was going to do when I grew up. I was reading the Seattle Weekly, and there, on the back page, was a little ad that said, “Go to massage school: call this number”. It was like God reached down and smacked me upside the head and said, “There! That’s what you’re supposed to be doing!” So I called. And the next week I went to my first class. And I was completely hooked.

I find it incredibly ironic that I, who went miles out of my way to avoid learning anything about the sciences when I was in school, found that A&P was the most exciting thing I’d ever encountered. I loved learning the muscles. I couldn’t get enough of the nervous system. Did you have any of those late nights with the anatomy coloring book, wishing there were more pictures, because you just couldn’t get enough? That was me, too.

I finished massage school and got my license, took some clients, and started trying to build a practice. I was still doing some work in the theatre, and I stayed with my nanny job for several years. When I finally jumped in to run a fulltime practice I made another important discovery: I am a pretty good bodyworker, but I am by no means especially gifted. And in fact, the actual work was not that exciting to me. I found myself hoping that clients would cancel, and watching the clock during sessions, praying for that second hand to move a little faster. Clearly I was in the wrong place: another dead end.

Back when I was still in massage school, I seemed to have an easy time with learning A&P, so when a couple of people joined my class late, my teacher asked if I could help them get caught up. I said, “sure.” Isn’t it amazing how the smallest decisions lead to the biggest changes? Through that tiny accident I found my true calling: I have a knack for taking big, complicated, interrelated ideas, and breaking them into small pieces that anyone can rebuild into their own big, complicated, interrelated versions of the same ideas. This skill has been the foundation of my career as a teacher and as a writer.

Doing massage didn’t turn out to be especially thrilling for me. My thrill was watching someone walk into a classroom absolutely convinced that there was no way in hell that he was going to learn all those damn bony prominences, and leave the classroom all excited about the acetabulum, the linea aspera, and the lesser trochanter. Watching people master something they don’t think they can do is the absolute best part of this job, and I hope I get to do that for the rest of my life. That’s my open path. The thing is, I would never have figured that out if I hadn’t hit all those dead ends first. I had to find out that public school teaching was not for me; I had to develop a sense of theatricality and drama in the way I relate to people (I use that theatre degree every time I discuss irritable bowel syndrome—I get to act out being a piece of poop); I had to practice bodywork in order to talk about it—I wouldn’t be here without those “wrong choices.”

That—finally—brings to the point I want to make today. One of the fundamental changes in massage education that I have seen since I’ve been in this business for about twenty years is the advent of accreditation and federal financial aid. If you’re like me, you see this as a very mixed blessing. Waaaay back when I was in massage school (and we carried our tables with us, uphill both ways, in the snow, and we liked it!), my class ran for 4 months, twice or three times a week and some weekends. We had one teacher who taught everything. It cost a grand total of $350. I think my first transcript says I have 125 hours of training—and that was a high standard! We had a broad mix of students in different phases of their lives, but at 23, I think I was the youngest.

Now things are different. Tuition can top ten grand, and without government financial aid many of our students couldn’t be in school. But have you seen what’s happening to the students? I know I’m getting older— now when I teach about Bell’s Palsy and I show that flaccid paralysis of the face, I have to make sure to put everything back in place. But they’re getting younger way faster than I’m getting older! In the term that I just concluded, I had one 17-year-old, four 18-year olds, and two twenty-year-olds. Starting school at 23 today would put me in the “mature” category of student.

Also, I’m entering a new phase in my life. I find that as my students approach the ages of my children, my tolerance for age-related behaviors gets less and less. I had a student whose boyfriend broke up with her in a text message at the beginning of an anatomy lecture. Of course I have a no cell phone policy, but these kids, they think we don’t see! She was beside herself, of course, and spent the rest of the lecture either crying out in the hall, or crying there in her seat. When I declined to give her credit for attendance that day, I was the bad guy! One of my favorites was when I was talking about the Spanish flu: a pandemic from 1918-1921 that killed 20 million people worldwide, and about half a million people in the US. One of my students, a woman a little older than I, perked right up and said, “Oh, that’s what my father had! Everyone told me when my father was 3 he had the Spanish flu!” And a sweet young thing next to her gasped and said, “Did he live?”

In another instance, I had two students, a boy and a girl, who fell in love in my pathology class. They would sit in the back of the room and whisper and pass notes to each other. Sometimes they would write the notes on each other. Somehow they thought no one would notice. When the day came for the young man to give an oral presentation, he got up to speak, and the entire class starting whispering together and passing notes to each other. It was a moment of great personal triumph.

Behavior like this really makes me a little crazy. I feel like I want to create an environment in the classroom that is out of reach of day-to-day distractions, where nothing gets in the way of the glories of the topic at hand—but it’s not always a realistic expectation.

And there’s a big part of me that says most of these students, these children, don’t have what it takes to be successful in this business. We can provide knowledge, and the tools to build skills, but we all know that successful massage therapists are individuals with a richly developed sense of self, an ability to be both intuitive and analytical, and an internal sense of purpose that only comes with a certain maturity. Of course there are exceptions to the rule, but my point is that when we look over classes composed largely of teenagers (or people who act like teenagers), we have to wonder how many of them will be in practice in five years. The statistics say not many.

This was an issue for the speaker at the last graduation I attended. She was beseeching these new graduates not to join those statistics. And I realized that, while we certainly want to provide the everything it takes to help our students be successful in this field, that is simply not that path that some people take. People come to massage school for lots and lots of reasons that may have little to do with running a successful practice. Sometimes they know it, sometimes, like with me, they don’t, and massage school is one in a series of dead ends. And that’s frustrating, because as schools we want to do well, and have wonderful placement rates, and be a good contributor to the national economy; we want to offer a good return for those financial aid dollars, but that’s not an entirely practical or realistic goal. And is that a bad thing? A good thing? It’s just a truth that has to be named.

But think about this: we live in a scary and uncertain world. Our young people are coming of age during a time of chronic national crisis. (Chronic crisis: isn’t that an oxymoron?) And there is something about massage that makes even young people think they want to do this as a career—and I don’t think it’s just the billboards, and TV and radio ads about working in glamorous settings and making a hundred dollars an hour. Our students, young and not so young, are coming to us because they feel called to make a positive change. We provide the tools for them to do that. Even if they don’t end up practicing massage therapy, they will have come to adulthood in a setting that fosters wholeness, honesty, clarity, and connectedness with other people. Wherever they end up, they’ll carry that experience with them for the rest of their lives. We are touching so many more people than massage therapists.

So this is the heart of my message: massage education is more than massage education. It is a place to model and define a lifestyle of integrity and of striving for excellence. Whether our students end up practicing massage or not—and of course we hope they do—they will have been profoundly influenced by their time in our care. Let’s accept that as a gift, and use it that for all it’s worth. Thank you.