Dear Professor

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What is it like, standing invisible in front of a class? Does it hurt your heart knowing every student looks through you with mental ear-plugs? Do you feel like your life is dripping through your clenched fingers like suffocating raindrops?

I would.

Put those drops in a glass. Don't waste them, you only have so many. You're watering the linoleum with your monotony. I would be watering it with tears--tears for time ticking by without kissing a single person's heart. Don't you miss it? Don't you miss that time? It could have been so meaningful. It could have changed lives, thoughts, hearts... Instead, it's tossed to the breeze like wish-less dandelion fluff. Students work on homework or plan their schedules while you speak. Can we call it 'speaking'? It comes off as a mechanical drone, memorized and spewed out every other semester all for a paycheck. I want to cry for you.

Is this the future you wanted? When you were out playing soldier-hero with your neighborhood best friend, did you aspire to be a distant impersonal lecturer? No. No one would desire to be dull and ignored. You had passion at one point. You dug it up with the earthworms before casting your line into your future. Where did it go? You dropped it on the way to the fishing hole. Now you're here with the world's tackle-box and a cemented lawn chair.

But your pond is drying up and you're catching nothing. You need to go back. You need to crawl on your hands and knees until you find that muddy, trodden passion. It's still there. It's crying, waiting to be held and attached to your fishing hook. You'll catch something. I promise. So why aren't you moving? Why aren't you seeing? Why aren't you living?

Oh professor. Pause for a moment. We won't mind the silence...it's much the same as your lecturing. But in this pause, answer my question--internally, externally, written with chalk...I don't care, but answer it. Your soul needs you to. Your passion needs you to. Your dry dwindling future begs you to. Answer it or at least take a precious second to think it.

Are you who you want to be?

Passionless Professors

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Dearest professors, where is your passion?

I cannot imagine pursuing a life career without passion. Perhaps I have an extra dose of passion or perhaps my professors only received an Oliver-Twist-serving.


No matter the 'perhaps', passion is lacking in the classrooms of my profession. What must it feel like, waking at 5am only to scrape false motivation off the floorboards and dump it in your day-old coffee on the way to work? What does the heart feel, knowing that 24 hours of life are ticking away with bitterness never to be retrieved?

Nearly all my professors at UCM have tied PhD's to their names with sparkling ribbons. I admire their perseverance. I admire their drive. But in the classroom I only see frowns and pursed lips, I only hear monotone lecturing, I only touch the weight of bland printed powerpoints, and I taste nothing but despair and sympathy toward them.
My PhD-less professors at Biola University inserted a syringe of joy and zeal into my speech-therapy veins. They were miracle-doctors, accomplishing the impossible in Nadine-the-Titanic.





"Even God can't sink this ship!" people said about the mighty Titanic, yet it sank with tragedy.




"Nothing can make me like speech therapy!" I said to my friends, yet now I drool over terms like dysphagia, perseveration, and aphasia.

My undergraduate professors did that. They subjected themselves as tools into the hands of the most skillful Mechanic and He tweaked me into this disco ball of speech-therapy passion. So what is missing in my professors here in Missouri? Why do they seem so incapable of enthusiasm? Why do I want to jump from my seat, snatch the laser pointer from their limp hands, and scream to my classmates, "This is interesting! This is fascinating! They're just not showing it to you!"
These same classes that changed my life in undergrad are leaving my poor graduate classmates (deprived of these topics in undergrad) hanging from the rope of discouragement. How can my speech therapy girls fall in love with a topic that's being presented as if it's a dead bug stuck to the wall?

Now that I look, now that I despair, it's not so hard to see why my undergraduate professors were so much more impacting. The world said they were unqualified because they had no PhD's, but God...God said differently.

Please pray for my professors here at UCM--that their lives find the meaning that they so desperately want. That fulfillment will crawl into their alarm clocks and that early sunrises will turn to joy instead of wake-up calls. So much could be different. So much could be learned...