About ME

To me, speech pathology is a union between two key passions of mine: language and therapy. These two pathways developed separately for me; later in life I was immediately captivated when I discovered the intersection between these two fields. I had, of course, been tangentially aware of speech therapy and what that meant, but it had not occurred to me that I might be able to make this my career. As I learned more about what speech therapy entails and the role that speech therapists have, I was increasingly able to see myself going down this route.

The first piece, rather unexpectedly, was the therapy portion. At the age of three, I became a big sister to my fraternal twin brothers, Anders and Glen. The differences in their personalities became pronounced very early in life. For Glen specifically, it was clear from infancy that he was not entirely like other children the way his twin brother was. He struggled with muscle coordination and was often injured. It is a running joke in our family that Glen had a permanent bruise on his forehead as a child– he never seemed to be able to use his arms to stop his own fall, so he landed squarely on his forehead. He got stitches multiple times before his fifth birthday. Later, I would find out that this struggle to coordinate was an early sign of ADHD. His mood seemed to rapidly oscillate between bouncing off the walls and moody, grumpy, and morose. 

At the age of seven, my mother decided to take him to see a doctor, as he was struggling to focus in school. It was recommended that he begin two kinds of therapy: one being occupational therapy, and the other being group play therapy. My mother now reflects that his first day of occupational therapy, where he began by running through an obstacle course before sitting down at a table with the therapist, was the calmest she had ever seen her son. The sort of activities that Glen participated in were often sensory-based, since he struggled with food, textures, and other sensory triggers. My brother now believes this helps him deal with uncomfortable experiences in everyday life and coping with sensory input that he disliked when he did encounter it. He described a lesson in particular where he was given jello and pudding, among other foods, and was encouraged to play with them together. He liked the pudding, but would not touch the jello no matter how many times he was asked to. He recounted a feeling of discomfort and disgust in response to certain sensory inputs. However, being exposed to some of this discomfort helped him to eliminate some of the fear and enabled him to interact more closely with the world around him. At home, I noticed that he seemed a lot calmer, content, and overall just more under control than he had before. As a child, I was astounded to see that he was able to change so much of his behavior because of the therapy that he had undergone. I found it miraculous that he and I were able to form a closer bond when he was not so constantly bombarded and overwhelmed by sensory inputs. As years went by and I reflected upon the changes my brother had gone through, I decided that I wanted to be able to help people like my brother. At this time, I was thinking about clinical psychology and traditional talk therapy; however, the idea stuck with me that therapy, no matter the kind, was a very useful tool that can help people overcome what was inhibiting them from living a better everyday life. 

The language piece was also sparked early in life, which is quite the blessing, now that I know far more about language acquisition theory. Having grown up in Houston, Texas, the proximity to the border with Mexico meant that multiculturalism and linguistic diversity were a part of everyday life. I was accustomed to hearing Spanish spoken all around me, in school, at grocery stores, on the television and radio, and by family friends and acquaintances. From elementary school, I had begun taking Spanish classes at my private school. However, these classes were often not very useful, in my memory at least. The school kept hiring new Spanish teachers, who would begin from scratch and teach us colors, numbers, and the alphabet again. Every year was the same content from the start, so I never felt I was progressing, and this frustrated me. Additionally, I noticed that the different teachers took different approaches to teaching the language. Some of them decided to speak entirely in Spanish, which was very confusing to me and my classmates, who stared at each other without understanding anything. Because of this, my love for languages was not realized until later in my education, and I was convinced that I should be a clinical therapist, having had the previous experience that I did. 

However, once I entered fifth grade, we began piecing together grammar, which I found fascinating. I liked memorizing the tables of verbs and all the different endings for each person. I thought it was very efficient that Spanish used inflectional endings– though I would not yet know that was what they were called– and thus rendered personal pronouns unnecessary. I loved the notion of language as a puzzle, putting together grammatical pieces and rearranging words to make meaningful sentences. 

At the age of eleven, my family packed up and moved to Norway, which drastically changed the trajectory of my language education. While there, I attended an English-language international school, where both Norwegian and Spanish or French were required languages. The summer before beginning school, I tried to absorb as much Norwegian as I possibly could from the immersion environment around me. Learning Norwegian was new and exciting, and as I was in the country, I was eager to learn how to communicate there. The language barrier showed me how important it is to be able to communicate clearly with those around you– this motivated me to learn Norwegian right off the bat. I also continued with Spanish at my new school, where I was exposed to more European Spanish. In seventh grade, I got the opportunity to live with a host family in Spain for ten days. The family did not speak English, so it forced me to use my Spanish to communicate. In this scenario, I picked up a lot of Spanish in ten days, and proved to me that by practicing, my language skills could improve, rapidly, even. 

By eighth grade, my Norwegian and Spanish were around the same level, and I enjoyed learning both simultaneously. However, this only became conscious to me during my parent-teacher conference this year with my teacher, who had taught me both Norwegian and Spanish at different times. He explained to my mother that I had a real affinity for languages. He advised me to be a language teacher, and told me that I had a knack for picking up both Spanish and Norwegian, especially in regards to grammar and structure. I was a little dumbfounded– it had never occurred to me that I was good at languages, only that I enjoyed the classes and that my language skills were improving. I had always thought that my peers must feel the same way about languages, but here I realized that they may not, and that language could be a real career path for me. I was at once surprised and captivated, and here I decided that I wanted to continue learning languages for as long as I could. I began to notice that native Norwegians would compliment my language skills and that I could communicate relatively well with them, despite the strong dialectic features present in Stavanger, Norway, where I lived. 

In 2016, after the completion of ninth grade, I returned to the United States and began attending public high school in Texas. Here Spanish was the most popular language students took– most students had not taken Spanish prior to eighth or ninth grade, which shocked me– why hadn’t these students had foreign language classes since elementary school, the way I had? It was clear that the curriculum did not favor language learning the way I had experienced previously, which saddened me. I became passionate about foreign language education in school, and began teaching myself Norwegian at home so as to make up for the loss of classes at school. My Norwegian progressed past the point it had been in Norway, simply because of my own efforts. I eventually entered a class with native Spanish speakers, where I dove into Hispanic literature. When I began college, I continued with both Spanish and Norwegian classes, having tested into the highest possible level in both. 

Language has taken me so far, and has always been there for me. While I was still living in Norway, I began being able to speak to my Norwegian relatives in their native language when I met with them. I could tell by the look in their eyes that this meant the world to them, that their younger, American relative had learned the language of her ancestors. Language creates so many of these beautiful moments of the communion of identity and history. Because of my proficiency in Norwegian, I have taught over a hundred adult and child students in various contexts and through various levels. I have gotten internships, jobs, and other experiences because of my ability to speak Norwegian. I feel that Norwegian has become a niche for me in which not many people are qualified, but because of my background with the language, I have proven to be an invaluable resource for many people hoping to learn the language. I have often heard expressed gratitude from my students for offering Norwegian classes since it is not a common occurrence. Through this I learned to be grateful for language, and for all that I have experienced and seen that helped me on my path to learning language. There is something magical about the look in a student’s eye when they learn how to communicate in another language, one piece at a time. To me, the culmination of this journey through the Norwegian language occurred just this past fall, when I got the chance to meet Her Majesty Queen Sonja of Norway, and present research that I had done through the Norwegian-American Historical Association. I could have never imagined that when I began learning Norwegian as an eleven-year-old, that ten years later, I might be meeting the queen of that country. 

As for Spanish, I have gotten to help children learning the English language, especially those in elementary school. In high school, I worked with children at Kumon Math & Reading Center who came from bilingual homes, and who were just beginning to learn English in school. During my field experience for an education course, I got to work with a bilingual child in the classroom, who was also just picking up English. The classroom was a dual immersion classroom, so her peers also were learning Spanish, but she needed some extra help with her English as well. It is always a great privilege to get to work with those students, as I really enjoy watching them grow not only their language skills, but also navigating a dual identity through their bilingualism. This was my motivation in pursuing a certificate for teaching English as a foreign language. 

At some point during my high school career, I realized that there were two paths I was interested in, as I have just explained above. they had developed separately, at different points in my life, but both had followed me since childhood. Gradually, I realized that there was a way for me to combine these two paths. Speech pathology walks that wonderful line between language and therapy. There is the ability to help others through therapy, and the ability to teach and to learn in language. I am so passionate about both of these aspects that speech pathology only seems like the most natural fit for me. I am well aware that speech therapy  encompasses more than just these two aspects, and that it is not something that can be simplified to just two portions, but I see these portions as being at the heart of what speech therapy is about. This was confirmed during my junior year of college when I began participating in speech therapy sessions with an adult cochlear implant user. Watching him be so happy to be able to communicate more efficiently was certainly the highlight, as was working with other students interested in speech pathology. This only convinced me further that the path I am taking is the right one and that this career is truly a special place.