I saw this mural the last time I was in Philadelphia.
It's on the corner of Baltimore and 50th. I passed it a few times before I noticed it, but once I saw it, the longer I looked the more I was moved. To me this represents teaching and the work of caring better than any image I've seen. It shows how the caretakers heart is strengthened by those it nourishes, and how for the child, the caretaker is her world.
I went to a Story-Collider a few months ago and saw a local neonatologist, Nitin Ron, talk about saving babies 'no bigger than your iphone.' He spoke about the complex ethics of neonatal medicine, and how the scientific advancements that save younger and younger lives also create weighty moral dilemmas. He spoke about meditating in Tibet to find answers, and returning to Brooklyn to see a girl on the street with severe physical and cognitive impairments stop and thank him after her mother said, "That's him. That's the man who saved you."
He spoke about how in Vietnam the word for hospital, nha thuong, means 'house of love', and how medicine is the intersection between science and love. He spoke about how without love, there could be no medicine, and the tragedy that we have so many metrics in medicine, and no metric for love. I approached him afterwards and told him that I thought the practice of teaching was also a marriage between best practices and love, and that until we came up with a true metric for love, there was no sense in any standardized assessment.