You Can’t Escape Being An SLP…

We all feel this way…you just can’t escape being an SLP. While some people can leave their job at the end of the day and not identify with it until they walk back into the office, that is just not the case with us. We hear lisps, distorted /r/s, that voice that doesn’t sound quite right, the reciprocal language between parents and children, and the…ahem…social difficulties of people around us.

Summer is a time when I seem to notice it more. Probably because my brain is not running like this, “write IEP goals, evaluate student X, schedule that meeting, go to this meeting, plan for next week, write progress reports…”

Here are some locations that you might catch yourself thinking like an SLP:

-In Target the other day, I listened to a mom and a toddler go back and forth with various sounds. Child would do it, mom would do it, and so on. I thought, “that’s some quality turn-taking right there!” This can happen anytime you’re around children.

-Anytime I watch a TV show where the person talking has a lisp. Can’t think of one off the top of my head, but it’s happened before.

-While shopping, you might hear some less than polite customers and think, “well, he/she could use some pragmatic therapy.”

-Ordering at a restaurant. Sometimes I’ve had servers who don’t write down the orders, but manage to remember everything. Then I think, “well he/she has great auditory memory abilities!” (<— unlike myself)

-When you hear a gravelly/hoarse voice, and wonder if it’s vocal nodules.

-When you’re at a restaurant and someone coughs and you think, “that person just aspirated/penetrated.”

-Any movie that a character has a distorted /r/. I think I remember people saying that the kid in Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day had one.

Where else do you find it difficult to shut off your SLP brain?