When I was ten or eleven years old, I walked to school with a friend who lived on the same street, and often I would arrive at her house before she was ready to leave for school. To amuse myself while waiting, I would draw pictures of animals on a small chalkboard that was on the wall near the kitchen. My friend’s father was a marine biologist, an occupation that I considered at the time to be the pinnacle of success and desirability. Dream job! Many of my drawings featured ocean or coastal scenes and animals, with research vessels that I modeled on the ones I’d seen in my Jacques Cousteau books.

Aardvark

Since then, I have continued to draw animals on chalkboards, lecture notes, meeting abstracts books, notepads, paper towels, and those horrible dry-erase boards. Only recently did I realized that my drawings could serve any purpose beyond keeping me awake and semi-attentive during boring lectures or seminars.

Gecko

When I first started teaching medical students, a physician friend admonished me, “Promise me you won’t mess with their heads!” Puzzled, because I’m actually a very kind and non-combative individual in meatspace, I asked her what she meant. She responded, “You PhD-types just don’t understand the level of stress that’s associated with those practical exams!”

Opossums

Well, I probably still don’t understand the level of stress associated with taking practical exams in gross anatomy, but we do take a lot of time and care setting them up, and the “tags” are never intended to be tricksy or deceptive. To accommodate all the students, we have 50 to 75 identification and rest stations through which the victims examinees cycle, and sometimes, due to the level of focus and stress, the students tend to wander off course, turn backwards, or skip a station. So we draw arrows on the chalkboards to guide them.

Spotted Hyena

I thought the plain arrows were boring and uninspiring, so I started adding animal drawings to a few of them. Yes, my animals are cartoonish and simplified, and most are not entirely anatomically correct, but in my defense I’ll say:

• I have 15 chalkboards in four large anatomy rooms to decorate in this manner, and only a short time in which to complete all my drawings
• The chalkboards are splattered and streaked with patches of, well, you can imagine what, and thus the chalk catches and slips in unexpected ways = not the most cooperative drawing surface
• I have to draw in a much larger scale than I am used to doing in my sketches and art journals

Baboon

Of course the animals are erased (or modified in amusing ways) within a few days, so the process also teaches me to not be attached to the products of my hands, and reinforces the Buddhist concept of impermanence.