Was I Destined to Be a Speech-Language Pathologist?

For this post, I'm taking a self-indulgent detour into how I ended up being an SLP.

Some SLPs seem to have known from early on that this is the career they wanted.

Not me.

In my early years as an SLP, I often felt a bit incredulous that I had a job working with children. I was never someone who was particularly drawn to kids, nor did I have any aspirations about trying to help them when I was a young person deciding what I'd do for work.

But here I am -- knee deep in kids with a pretty specialized set of skills!

Whenever people ask me why I became an SLP, I explain that it was just a series of logical next steps: I had to do an "independent study" project in my last year of high school and chose "child language development" from a list of possible topics. I actually enjoyed researching it, and did well on the project, which led me to enroll in an undergraduate degree in Linguistics, a theory-heavy field. A master's degree in speech-language pathology seemed like the next logical step, as I tried to apply the theoretical information I'd just amassed more practically. When it was time to choose my externship placement during grad school, an advisor (randomly?) suggested that working with kids might be a better fit for me.

I didn't take any of these steps with a defined endpoint in mind. I wouldn't say I was completely passive in the process, but I can't say I was driven to become a pediatric SLP.

But a few years ago, I learned something interesting about an ancestor of mine, and it has made me wonder if there may have been something deeper leading me here.

Meet my late, great-grandmother, Clara Nuttall (née Blakely). I never met her, but she worked as a teacher at The Ontario School for the Deaf (OSD) in the 1920s.

I've been lucky to have been given a few of her notebooks and diary entries that span from 1918 to 1924. Schools back then embraced oral/aural teaching approaches, where deaf and hard-of-hearing children were expected to read lips, use spoken language, and read/write in English (versus use sign language). Sign language was discouraged 😬. This would have been incredibly hard for some kids, depending on their level of hearing loss and other factors. I'm certainly glad our field has progressed away from this kind of ableism and towards more cultural sensitivity and strengths-based learning (though there is always more work to be done).

Nevertheless, it's been interesting to explore her notebooks and to see the "language nerd-dom" shining through. There are descriptions of language lessons that could be used perfectly well in a present-day classroom. In a notebook from 1924, Clara wrote about learning a teaching approach called Visible Speech, an articulation-based spelling system that was designed to help deaf and hard-of-hearing students use oral language. Visible Speech was developed by Alexander Melville Bell and advanced by his son, Alexander Graham Bell (the inventor of the telephone), both pioneers in the field of speech-language pathology. Clara had the same spelling system in her notebook that you can see on this web page.

I find it pretty amazing that, 100 years ago, my great-grandmother was drawing the same sagittal plane views of the articulators I drew in grad school!

Since we're already on a detour, here's another cool tidbit from a journal entry from July 5th, 1924, when Clara traveled to New York City for training at the Lexington School for the Deaf:

"Tried to shop in the morning but only got shoes, stockings, and a blouse for mother because the big stores close in New York on Saturday. At eleven, we went to Hunter College to hear HELEN KELLER, who gave a very inspiring address. She is a most attractive-looking woman with pretty brown eyes and a charming manner, and friendly smile. She said, “As I stand here in the sunshine of your friendship, it is hard to realize there is any affliction in this world. Some think the world is topsy-turvy, but I have noticed that humanity has enough of life and love and dreams to keep it going strong for a long time yet.”

Learning about my great-grandmother has caused me to reflect on my own lifelong interest in language. From learning to speak German in preschool, to my favorite storybook as a child (if you've ever read it you'll know why it could never be used as a StoryWhys book!), to an epiphany I had while conjugating French verbs in elementary school, to the way my whole world shifted when I read The Catcher in the Rye in high school, to the way I listened to Eddie Murphy's standup routines on repeat, to my love of meticulous metaphors, the economy of words, and the perfect crossword clue, I've been fascinated by language since I was very young.

Has there been something deeper pulling me to be an SLP? Is language nerd-dom tucked into my DNA, along with my green eyes and long thumbs?

I'd like to think so.

How did you become an SLP? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

And if you need any research-based therapy materials...

LEVEL UP YOUR SPEECH-LANGUAGE THERAPY ACTIVITIES WITH STORYWHYS

Did you find this blog post helpful? Subscribe below to get the latest blog posts, which feature lots of therapy ideas for busy SLPs who want to provide fun, impactful, and meaningful speech-language therapy.

StoryWhys now offers the Speech and Spell series of resources. I am always trying to tie articulation work and spelling together in my therapy, and I've never found any good resources out there to help me do this. So I made my own! Many more speech sounds and spelling rules to come. They'll be 50% off for 48 hrs when new resources are added to the StoryWhys store. Find them here.

Did you know book companions can be among the best speech-language therapy materials for elementary students? Explore all of the StoryWhys book companions for speech-language therapy in my store. You'll find comprehensive book companions that target many different language skills or Spotlight Series book companions that focus on one type of skill, all using high-quality, beloved storybooks.

For quick videos to help you get the most from StoryWhys book companions, check out the YouTube channel here.

And get a FREE, 71-page book companion for speech-language therapy on the free downloads page.

Enjoy!