How should this story end?

This past spring, I was invited to write a personal essay about teaching for a peer-reviewed journal. Having found that process very fulfilling, and having gotten some positive feedback on the product, I decided to write another one — an even more personal one that would tell the story of how I slowly learned to teach anatomy.

Overall I think it’s a good story, with some honest admission of personal shortcomings, some light finger-pointing, and some twists and turns that other instructors may relate to. My biggest challenge turned out to be how to bring it to a close. Here’s my first draft of my concluding paragraph:

While I still have much to learn about anatomy and anatomy education, I no longer feel like a complete imposter. As one indication of this, I attended the AAA “Anatomy Connected” conference in Portland (Oregon) in March 2025, and I kind of enjoyed it! The people to whom I related best were the medical students who presented posters and talks on unusual features of their cadavers, such as a scrotal kidney (Cushing et al., 2025) or a triceps brachii with a fourth head (LaFave et al., 2025). While they were not the true experts in the room, they had learned enough to notice and appreciate the wonders of anatomical variations. They were happy to share their findings, and I was happy for them — and for myself. Clearly anatomy was tractable and fun for these students, and at last I could say the same.

That conference really was a nice moment for me, and I did my best to capture that feeling, but it fell flat for one of my first readers, who gently questioned whether that ending was really the one I wanted. Is the big, climactic finish simply that our hero is now able to…attend an anatomy conference?

I had to admit that the reader was right; this conclusion would be a bit of a snooze to anyone outside of my inner circle. So I tried again, and the ending wound up going in a completely different direction. You can check it out here: Figuring it out: how I became a decent anatomy teacher in three hard steps (G.J. Crowther, Advances in Physiology Education 50: 915-918, 2026).

My Aunt Prudence, not a dispenser of idle flattery, liked the new version, and perhaps you will too.