Softball SLPs

Somehow, all things I currently love I once hated for a time. Speech therapy was one. Softball was another. On Tuesday night I united the two with double-sided tape. The result? A really smart, all girls, just-for-fun-but-we're-really-competitive-on-the-inside softball team that knows exactly what to do if someone gets pegged in the head mid-game and receives a traumatic brain injury (bonus: we do follow up speech evaluations! All for a small fee and a free softball).
Yes, my speech-therapy graduate department has put together a softball team. I couldn't be more pumped. My name was close to first on the sign-up list and my glove was already in my trunk. Our first double header was Tuesday.

I pulled out the hair-ties, extra-powerful deodorant, and athletic shorts (they're new. I'm branching out from Wyoming-garb and now own two pairs of shorts). As catcher, I've bonded with softballs in the face, the ankle, the head, and the knees. Bats aren't as friendly to meet, but they've knocked their overbearing personalities into my skull before.

Naturally, my head was more prepared than my body for the physical exertion. I took a few practice swings in front of the mirror (vain? Yes.) and popped-out my shoulder (not in a good way). My back already hurt (what am I, a grandma?), but at least I looked good. In fact, I looked ready to run four marathons with weights on my ankles and no water bottle without growing tired. A jog to my car and back (about eight yards total) trampled that delusion.

The games were exhilarating...until we started playing. We all matched. We were ready to have fun. We even had a new bat.
We lost 20-0.
Game two went better. We played four innings instead of three, but still lost 23-0. Not a single run. Not even a player past second base. I consoled myself with Relient K and grapes. Still, you'd be hard-pressed to see another graduate speech-therapist softball team do better in a double header before the night before an 8am exam. Hard-pressed, indeed.

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...