How Bad Would It Be to Just Throw It All Away?

A box of my super important office stuff.

This morning's tech inservice ended early so I had time to race home to meet the nurse so we could check and repack my son's wound. That left enough time to eat a lunch of Twizzlers and Diet Coke on the way to school. I was anxious to dig into my new office space and clean, throw-out, and re-arrange. Outside, it was pouring. Really pouring. I wrapped several piles of books in plastic bags and loaded them into my trunk along with some crates. I parked close to one of the side doors of the school and put my bagged-up books in my teacher cart and wheeled in the first of many loads. By the time I made it in the building, I was soaked. I squeaked down the long hallway, pulling my teacher cart behind me. When I reached my office, I flipped on the switch and stood in the doorway, dripping. Before I could even bring any of my own stuff in the room, I would have to go through the bookshelves and purge dozens of ancient speech exercise books. I left my own junk in the hallway and started unloading the bookshelves. At first, I considered each resource manual. I paged through them thinking about whether or not it contained anything I might use during the coming school year. When I started to find my own name written on the inside covers of some of the resource books I began pitching most of them into a large plastic storage bin. Half of these speech drill books were mine when I was a speech therapist for the district twenty years ago. Good grief.

Posted with Blogsy

Sticking with Blogger (for now)

With my recent move back to speech therapy I figured why not start a new blog to document this transition. I created One Speech Therapist as a companion blog to One Literacy Coach. Since I view blogs as ongoing pieces of writing, I needed to consider audience and purpose for the new blog. My purpose for blogging really hasn't changed in the last year and a half. I blog because I enjoy connecting with other educators, bloggers, and writers and sharing ideas. I'm not interested in selling anything or blogging for profit. The challenging part for me for this new blog is audience. Who do I want to connect with? Speech therapists have lots of different specialties and work in many different settings. And I'm not even sure who I am as a speech therapist anymore, although I'm working on it. I've been reading, reading, reading, articles and published handouts and PowerPoint's from recent conferences. I'm also reading professional books written by speech therapists with a deep understanding of literacy and the reciprocal nature of oral language, written language, and reading. So what does all this have to do with sticking with Blogger?

I considered using WordPress for my new blog. I read and reread blog post after blog post touting the benefits and disadvantages of a variety of web hosts, and I decided to stick with Blogger. I know I don't own my content but I'm okay with that. And WordPress isn't going to help me with my concerns about audience. Figuring out audience will take time and effort regardless of the blogging platform I choose to use. WordPress has wonderful features but  I'm not willing to invest the time yet to learn how to navigate it. Blogger is so easy to use and I haven't encountered significant reasons to switch. My biggest whine about Blogger used to be the lack of threaded comments and they added that feature a few months ago. I also enjoy using Blogsy to write and publish posts and it works like a charm in Blogger. Actually, I think Blogsy works great with WordPress and other web hosts as well. Blogsy is an awesome app by the way. So for now, I'm sticking with Blogger.

Going Back to Speech

So you are going back to speech therapy. Wow. That is sort of unexpected. You have been gone for twelve years, which is about nine years longer than you ever anticipated. So why did you leave your comfy speech therapy world to dive into the unchartered territory of literacy coaching to begin with? Oh yeah, you wanted to see if you could glean enough about the connections between oral language, reading, and writing so that you could assist children with language learning difficulties to better access core curriculum. Yup. That’s why. So did you figure all that out yet? Nope. Yeah, but you know a lot more now than you did twelve years ago, right? Yup. That’s good, right? Yup. You knew you would probably have to go back eventually and it isn’t that you left speech because you didn’t like it. You were just looking . . . looking for something more. Looking for answers. Hoping to study things that your grad school profs would have certainly viewed as out of the realm of a speech therapist. So how are you going to handle this transition back? After everything you’ve learned, there is no way you will do things the way you used too. Nope. No way. Maybe some things. You seem a little . . . worried, no, no, more than worried, maybe . . . scared. Yeah, I know you are still sad about the whole lit coach thing but you have to move on. So you are sad and scared and ticked and a whole bunch of other emotions but you’re gonna have to get over it. Good grief, at least you have a good job for crying out loud! That is a heck of a lot more than a lot of people can say in this town. Get off your pity-pot. Here is a to-do list to help get you going.

1. Find your ASHA (American Speech and Hearing Association) membership card and log into their website.
2. Review and collect relevant articles on CCSS and speech therapy services from LSHSS (Language Speech and Hearing Services in the Schools) journals.
3. Search for interesting speech therapist bloggers.
4. Check Pinterest for speech therapy resources and apps.
5. Obtain a copy of Michigan Guidelines for Speech Therapy Services.
6. Read the last book in the 50 Shades trilogy.