Episode 2 l Season 1: Opening doors into a new world with Liza

Highlights from this episode:

On this episode we chat with Liza about her upbringing, her schooling, and her journey to SLP. Liza shares her road to SLP and the tomato story!

Transcript

welcome to the bold slp podcast we are so happy that you're here and can't wait to share with you all of the amazing conversations we've been having we are the co-founders of the bold slp collective and we are also your hosts liza, desi, and myself ingrid each of us has a variety of experiences in all things bilingual and bimodal speech language pathology you'll get to know us pretty well on here we started this podcast to share our lived experiences but also because we want to bring advocacy and cultural humility to the forefront of every speech therapy conversation we hope that you'll join us each week and we hope that you enjoy this episode

hi there this is ingrid and i'm so excited for today's episode it is our second episode of the bold slp podcast and i am thrilled to be talking to liza she is one of our co-founders and she is the sweetest person so i want to introduce you to her with episode 2 opening doors into a new world with liza. Lisa how's it going? hey! it's going really well thank you for that sweet intro um i'm going to get right into it because i have just so much to tell you okay we'll start with uh my childhood so my parents are Sri Lankan and i was born in Canada they came here as refugees in the 80s and they really had to start from scratch. At home i heard a lot of Tamil, Sinhalese

and some English it was all mixed together and uh this is this is what i heard most of the time was a mix of Tamil, English and Sinhalese so in Quebec we have to go to French school that's like the law if you're an immigrant like there's french schooling is the the language of instruction and so going to school i didn't understand one word that was being said

i came home crying every day and i told my parents that i didn't know what was going on and they couldn't help me because they didn't speak any french at all and i remember one day i was fully potty trained and a teacher would not let me go to the bathroom because i couldn't say " Est-ce que je peux aller au toilette s'il vous plaît?" all of those words 'may i please go to the bathroom' i couldn't even say toilette or s'il vous plaît it had to be the whole thing and so i peed my pants and i was sent home on the bus with wet pants because i couldn't um communicate exactly where the teacher wanted me to communicate so i think in there yeah i think in there was a little a little planting of what my future could look like and what can i do for kids like me who can't quite communicate but um just need a little support you know right so anyway how old were you i was five in that story so kindergarten yeah wow yeah four or five yeah but i mean i was fully able to communicate just not in the language my teacher wanted me to communicate it exactly so there's really a different difference between yeah communication and speech so i know we'll get into that uh at some other uh time but yeah so growing up in a Sri Lankan household um the dream is that you're either a doctor an engineer or a lawyer there wasn't really any in-betweens maybe a teacher and also a mother like a stay-at-home mom so those were like the big options for my future they were the only ones there was no uh you know tiktok influencer or anything like that back in the day so i decided that medical school was what was for me and i really wanted to be a pediatrician i wanted to work with young kids my whole life and i love teaching i would teach sunday school i would tutor, there was always teaching in my life so when i started my first year in biochemistry i realized pretty early on that my life would be cutting up rats and looking for e coli which did not sound like something i wanted to do so i decided to move um to the education field and it was it was a hard uh switch i mean the guidance counselors were not for it and i kept being reminded of how lucky i was to be in this university and how many students want to be in pre-med - want to be in biochem but i really didn't care because i knew that it wasn't for me and that's not that wasn't going to be like a happy future for me me and the rats it just wasn't going to work out exactly yeah so i switched over into education and that was the first time i realized that school could be easy just when you're learning something that you love and that you're passionate about it's like everything changes the words come alive like what teachers say start to make sense you don't have to just blindly memorize powerpoints like it's it was it was a real shift just in in the way i was learning so learning a lot about myself did you have to start over when you switched from biochemistry to education i did actually i kind of had to i had to apply as a independent student i didn't apply as a transfer student because here like if you have a very low gpa you have almost no options for what program you want to get into so i just had to start from scratch as though i had come directly from CEGEP

wow yeah you have to find a way around it because i feel like these some of these systems that are in place are just to help the the elite students not the ones that struggle or the ones that are kind of in the wrong place you know and i know what CEGEP is because we've talked about it before but for our listeners what is CEGEP? it is the two years that you need to do in order to get into university here in Quebec so we have elementary school from kindergarten to grade six we have no middle school it's straight to high school seven to grade 11 and then you have two years of CEGEP so i guess grades 12 and 13 you would call it and then it's university and when we get into university we have credits from CEGEP that we can take with us depending on the program that we go into so we can potentially do a four-year program in three years because of CEGEP right so you had to start from scratch and then yeah how did that lead you to slp so i became a teacher and i was fascinated with these complex cases that teachers would just toss aside or kick'em out of class or or whatever they would do with the students that they couldn't work with so they ended up at this options school where i was teaching so i would have these very small classes of like six to twelve students max and they they had all been kicked out of their various high schools some for drugs some for behavior some for like intellectual difficulties for a variety of reasons but i loved teaching them and i honestly found it easier than teaching a group of 30 at a quote-unquote "regular school" i mean getting to know their learning styles repeating things saying things in a different way from what the textbooks was saying were saying like it was just it was all so fascinating to me and i loved it so i really thought like teaching was the way to go for me but these specific students were the ones i wanted to stay with and i wondered if there was something more i can study to help them so one day on a bright sunday morning i went to visit a new church and when i walked in there was a young boy sweeping the floor like way in the back and i noticed him and he'll come back in the story later so someone on the worship team invited me to join the youth group so i was around 18 yeah 18 or 19 at this point so i went to their youth group on friday night and when i came in i was clearly late everybody was already in their seats and like the worship had started and you know everybody was singing and this young man that had been sweeping the sunday before was sitting in the center of the group and there was a chair right next to him so i thought oh i can go sit next to him so i go over and i sit down and i look at him and he waves at me and i waved back and i asked him what time does this thing start at and he just looked at me and he pointed to his ears and made a kind of gesture and didn't respond so then i asked him again what time does this thing start at and again he pointed to his ears and did a few more gestures and i really didn't know what was going on so then i said it even louder what time does this thing start at just assuming that he couldn't hear me because of the loud music around and he took out a piece of paper and he wrote i'm Deaf and he passed it to me and i was so mortified that i had just yelled at a Deaf person and i i didn't know what to do when i was mouthing that i was sorry and i didn't even know if he could understand what i was saying this was the first time ever that i had met a Deaf person so he was kind of gesturing me to calm down and that it was okay and that he was not offended at all and i could see on his face that he was genuinely fine with this interaction and i was the one that was freaking out so he pulled up a chair between us and with his index finger he spelled the letters all caps NJ and he pointed to himself and i was like n j what does that mean and he looked at me and pointed to himself and i was like oh nj that's your name and he nodded his head yeah and then he like pulled my finger and put it on the chair and he was so clearly communicating what's your name so i thought oh my goodness so i spelt

l i z a and then he re-spelt it like over you know my air letters on the chair and he was like Liza and i was like Liza yes so we had introduced each other through this chair and i was in his Deaf world all of a sudden because he showed me how to communicate with him and my whole trajectory changed at this point i just this is the world i wanted to be in a world where like people can communicate through chairs people who could not communicate before now make it work you know i love that

so i went home that night and i memorized the asl alphabet and i started spelling every single thing so like h i hi h o w how a r e r y o u u like i thought sign language was just a series of spelling words so i would spell and spell and spell and spell and you know he would he would put my hands down after i would spell like a whole sentence and then he would sign to me the sentence like how are you for example would be how you in terms of sign language i was like okay like it's a full language and it it wouldn't make sense that you just spell every word that that would be so difficult for people to have to like piece back together right it was getting hard because i didn't know enough of the language to have a full conversation with him so i started writing him letters but little by little i'm like building my you know aac practice that i had never heard of yet but you know the chair the written component anyway so i write him uh hi my name's lisa i'm 19 years old you know i introduce myself completely and then he writes me back and his grammar is so different from mine like school i go and so then i'm realizing oh the asl grammar is different from english grammar and so just learning all about his language it was so fascinating to me and there was a small part of me that was thinking like oh should i teach him like how how you're quote-unquote supposed to write or like where the words go but then i realized when reading his letters if i sign them they all made sense like if i if i read the letter and then did it in sign language it was perfect asl so it was yeah it was really really incredible it is really interesting INGRID: i never got into asl um i didn't know um i could take asl in college so i never, i went for french and now i really wish i would have but it would have helped me a lot more than french LIZA: well i mean if you were in quebec french would have been really crucial but actually in my program in the us uh which i'm going to get to now um asl was a prerequisite to get into the program INGRID: oh wow we've got to make an episode about these programs they are all so different and how do you know where to go and then it's like the lottery of which program you land in without knowing LIZA: i know oh my goodness yeah and learning about your why it was just it was just so much fun i'm i'm wondering if i'm mistaking like maybe the language credit and asl being like an acceptable language credit but i know that mostly that is i know i mean i know that it is but i'm just wondering if it was a language credit that was needed or an asl language credit INGRID: it might have been just a general language credit because i feel like i had to meet the same requirement and my french counted okay does that make sense? LIZA: well yeah so i'm you know getting more and more proficient in sign language he actually after a while brought me to the MacKay center which is a school for the Deaf here in Montreal and that was very fun so all the teachers were Deaf and you're just immersed in the culture right off the bat and those were some incredible teachers i mean they would like bend over backwards to make sure you understood what they were saying but there was absolutely no talking they'd come in and they would be like a voice off and they would just show us a little sign of like turn off your voice and yeah of all the years i had been teaching i mean that was a real eye-opening experience of like really really great teachers that make you work in their own language and push you into their culture in a very in a very respectful way so i loved i loved those sign language classes so being - i still hadn't heard of speech and language pathology as a field so right now i'm learning all about new fields something to do with Deaf maybe an interpreter, an asl teacher, something but still no idea about slp so i decide since uh it was always embedded into me to be in the medical field that i should apply to be an audiologist and i applied for that but the only program that was there was the french program um in at the university of montreal here and so really i had to pass this french proficiency exam it's kind of funny because i applied to audiology and as a second choice i applied to law just for fun i had no interest in law and i had to pass a french proficiency exam and you had to get a certain grade on the french exam to qualify  to

medical programs um and i didn't qualify for any medical program because of my grade but i qualified for law so i got into law not into audiology

uh but yeah there was no way i was gonna pass learning law in french that there was just no way i mean i would barely be able to pass it in english so that was uh kind of sad and when i was at my gospel choir rehearsal we have these small groups and we and we chat a little bit between between rehearsal and they were all praying for me and hoping that i would get into the program and i had told them that i didn't get in because of my my french proficiency exam and one of them said i don't even know why you are

applying to audiology honestly you seem more like a speech pathologist and i was like what is that and she's like oh my sister is a speech therapist like you should go talk to her so yeah it's interchangeable sometimes they say speech and language pathologists sometimes they say speech therapist so for now i'll just say slp so she sent me over to her sister they were twins actually and they were actually CODA twins so both of their parents were Deaf so they yeah they had a wonderful story and they were just lovely human beings but anyway so i went over to uh to her twin sister and sure enough she was a speech therapist she had gone to plattsburgh so she told me all about her school and the amazing professors and i was like let me apply and i was so close to the application deadline i think i had a day or two to get all of my stuff in order and my paperwork as a canadian citizen and yeah and i just just made it and i got it oh my gosh yeah just it was meant to be it was meant to honestly it was so meant to be and like in honor of them and my amazing montreal gospel choir i uh as soon as i got to plattsburgh i auditioned for the plattsburgh state gospel choir and that's where i met my husband so really it was really really meant to be oh and that's in new york right yes it's in new york it's it borders montreal so plattsburgh montreal you can just drive close to vermont if you know where that is right oh yeah and the the professors were incredible i mean they really cared about us they really cared about our learning styles uh again school was like a joy i i understood all the material this is new right because i know in biochemistry and then way before that as a child learning everything in french i mean i was so used to being kind of half lost in school and now everything was just making sense coming together a lot of my experiences with the deaf community was you know falling in line with what i was learning in school we had a clinic right on campus so we saw clients like right from our first semesters i did too and i don't know if that's the norm in other programs but INGRID: i think it might be i mean we have such a short time to get our 400 hours LIZA: i i don't think so Ingrid i'm hearing in schools over here that they don't have associated clinics i mean they have a lot of placements that they put their students in which which all of us have to go to anyway but not all of them have on-campus clinics and like you get this green folder when you start and you don't know what case you're gonna get so you could be like sent to the alzheimer's group or you can have like a one-on-one um you know client with some articulation difficulty like you never know which one you're gonna get and it's fun because sometimes you get a case um that has to do with a course that you're only going to take in second year so to me that is real life experience because especially with working in private practice you'll get cases that you know nothing about and you have to hurry up and learn about it before you know the webinar comes out next year right that's amazing yeah we had both we had clinic on campus and then off campus placements as well yeah yeah that's what we had INGRID: that's more of that what i was saying like we don't have any uniformity across programs and i guess that could be a good thing because we all are kind of different clinicians and different people and need different learning experiences but maybe your grad programs need to do a better job at kind of advertising themselves? LIZA: yeah and i i understand what you mean about people learning differently but i think it's really crucial to have access to patients for the students right off the bat i mean i agree i mean that's what i had yeah i'm biased lectures can only take you so far i mean you can get 100 on all of your exams and still not know how to interact with a client INGRID: yeah all the people who like reach out to me and they're unsure about starting i'm like um i went in and i was taking intro to csd at the same time that i was taking neuro one and treating a patient yeah because i was coming out from outside the field so LIZA: yeah i had a i remember having a client with apraxia who was i think she was 85 years old and she was just the sweetest woman and i did not know what to do with her when i started and yeah by week two my supervisor really worked with me and showed me some some articles that i was only going to learn about in the following year in the second year and right and it went so smoothly and it actually made the course so much easier knowing that i had that client that i can always talk about and explain to the class it was yeah it was really really nice there was something to refer back to yeah exactly there was something that you had mentioned in your story actually about just linguistic diversity and feeling you know not quite mexican or not quite american or right or maybe you were fully feeling mexican but you also had that american identity right um i i was mentioning as a kid where i heard a lot of Tamil at home in English and some Sinhalese

and the word for insect or ant was 'poochie' okay so whenever like an ant or like a like a cockroach would would pass by i would hear like so i i heard that in the house okay so that to me was the word for insect any type of insect a spider a cockroach an ant anything anybody would you see any bug any bug exactly so i remember in school there was a cockroach in the class and i was like 'poochie' and then everyone was like what is she saying and they were laughing at me so hard and i had no idea why because to me there was no other word they were like and i was like okay but in my mind maybe i didn't know the french but i certainly knew the english and for sure that was a 'poochie' that i was looking at when i came home my parents were like no that's a Tamil word

and and the thing is now as an adult i would be like oh this is cool i know how to say this in three different languages but as a child i was so embarrassed and i didn't want to go to school the next day and like the kids kept like making fun of me puchi pucci like every time they saw me and it was it was such an unnecessary type of bullying you know because we just didn't know better back then and as a teacher you would hope that they say something along the lines of you know lisa's family is not from here and they use different words to describe different things but yeah and that is okay yeah but that is not what happened and i think back on those little moments that that could have so easily been avoided with just a little bit of education a little bit of support from uh from a speech pathologist you know in your school yeah INGRID: and just from getting to know you i know that those little experiences inform who you are as a therapist now LIZA: yeah absolutely i mean advocacy for kids is a huge one for me i mean even the story of how i ended up at that new church has everything to do with with advocacy for kids who are just not heard when you know bad things are going on exactly yeah

but anyway so all of that leads me to where i am now which is um well i'm a school-based slp i'm an instructor at a university i supervise two interns and i have a private practice yeah successful private practice now for how many years since 2015. so yeah wow six years i know INGRID: i always admire that so much you're a business owner boss lady i love i am such a bad business person i haven't jumped into that um but i love something that you've talked about before but like if you're feeling like where you're at at your work you're like not quite you know managing everything like don't add the private practice onto but if you're feeling ready like just start with one client and i think i haven't had that moment of like okay i feel ready i feel like maybe i was there the year before covid i was like hitting my stride and um had a partner at my school when things felt really good i was there and then boom covid hit

LIZA: Right i i don't know like with private practice it's a little bit tricky if you are driven and i'm saying this just just because i've seen it but if you are driven by money and you you want to have a private practice because you want to make the maximum amount of money i don't see it going very well right like you really need to have a passion for these families for this kind of work because it is a lot of work it seems like a lot of money at first but you know you're going to be taxed on it you have to use that money for all your own material all your own professional development your fees whatever you know gas so it's not that much money it looks like a lot on paper so it's really it's really really like a passion project i have to say and just on the on the topic of money and the love of money um one thing i learned coming out of grad school is to be careful what kind of boss and what kind of environment you end up in because as soon as you're feeling like you're in a fishy place where there's more harm being done to the to your clientele than good you you really need to find another place right yeah yeah there's a lot of toxicity in our in our field when it comes to bosses who have not studied speech therapy or psychology or or whatever and they're just business people you know just trying to hire slps to to make a lot of money from from whatever county or town that they're in yeah i don't think grad school prepares us for any of that no there i don't really think that there's really a push at all in learning about private practice in grad school i think they really want you working in schools and from the government for the government and like for the hospitals and whatnot i i don't think that they really encourage private practices to be honest INGRID: yeah i never i mean i knew about private practice because i had applied to work at one but i don't remember hearing about private practice as a student at all LIZA: yeah i i think it was like kind of the way you're treating me like i think it was like for the elite or like for the ones that made it and you know it it never really i didn't know anything about private practice and the thing is when i my first job as an actual speech therapist and i say actual because my first job out of grad school was actually a teacher for the Deaf under the guise of a clinical fellowship so i got my hours but i was functioning more as a teacher than a speech therapist but my second year out of grad school i was working at a very abusive clinic with a boss that just had no idea what i needed what the students needed what the families needed and it was just i mean it was like heavily aba practices which we know now are very abusive it was it was not good and i will credit her for knowing how to not run a clinic INGRID: i love that yeah you spent that time there learning how not to run your practice yeah LIZA: absolutely how how how not to treat people you know like just even the slightest things you know giving people breaks giving people a lunch hour like giving them professional development having a multi-disciplinary team like all of that is so necessary

INGRID: are you hiring? LIZA: i actually had at one point i had five speech therapists working for me oh my gosh yeah that was when we were really booming like just before covid

uh yeah i had a french one i had two at the clinic i had one working for me online like it was it was really really cool and i had an ot that had joined the team but then when covid

hit it was a lot harder and everything was like moved to telepractice right so it was i mean i was able to pay them more at that time because we weren't using office space or anything like that but i am yeah no i'm not hiring right now now i'm trying to downsize i'm trying to downsize because of all the different jobs i've taken on right mom right so i i there's that too also also but i have a very very supportive husband so it's it would not be possible without him 100 INGRID: i'm like trying to wrap my brain about everything i've learned about you today because it's making sense to me why you and i connected so instantly like it sounds like we had the same upbringing similar you know upbringings and interests and then now as adults we have like similar passions and similar kind of like life styles if that makes sense like even you saying that you um taught at your church and loved kids and like that was me i taught ccd and i knew i loved kids when i was you know 15 years old yeah and just like the parents were like really really passionate about your learning you know which a lot of people don't get that um it sounds like both of our parents were like wanting us to strive for more education and i don't know it just got me thinking like yeah this is why you and i clicked so quickly because we're like the same person in two different countries LIZA: honestly though but we were talking about just bilingual slps and slps of color in general like we set the standards so high for ourselves we put ourselves under a lot of unnecessary pressure you had mentioned in your story you know being in the top ten and feeling like that wasn't good enough because you want to be in the top five or top three or the very top the very top yeah yeah but there were moments in my learning that i will never forget that i that i wish for like future generations like so the craziest thing when i was in kindergarten the teacher wrote something on the board and it looked like squiggles to me like cartoon squiggles like like she had you know just drawn a bunch of zigzags and she said if anyone can read this word they'll be the first to play with the hamster today so i thought i wish i could read this and the girl next to me said " c'etait mon fa fa" which is French for like like it's so easy you know oh [ c'etait mon facile] is like a cute way of saying that's you i didn't know that yeah i mean i don't know if that's common french actually that's just what she said but anyway so i looked at her and thought how can she possibly think this is easy the teacher just like squiggled a bunch of lines on the board and she said you want me to tell you what it is and she whispered in my ear tomate which is tomato in French and i looked up at the board and all of a sudden like magic the first squiggle looked like a t and i looked up at the alphabet and i was like we learned about that then the next one oh that like the m like um we had like all of it just like came to life and since that moment i was able to read INGRID: oh but that was such a beautiful memory LIZA: right but i i teach it all the time in my phonological awareness course with teachers i always go back to that story because there's that moment where children can connect the letters to the sounds and blend them but until that moment hits they're not readers yet right they're just kids who know the alphabet or kids who know letter sound association but in all the ways my teacher tried to teach me all i needed was just a gentle whisper in my ear telling me what the word was without any kind of pressure and then it just came together so if we can like figure out what style each child needs to get it to click like would that be amazing INGRID: yes that's - i love that story and i love that we are ending on that note i think that sums up everything that i know about you i think so i think it's perfect oh you just needed that little bit of whisper and everything kind of became clear and then you probably started writing 20 million words after that LIZA: that'll be for another time INGRID: all right oh lisa thank you so much for sharing your story LIZA: thank you for letting me tell it this is really fun INGRID: yeah i love getting to know you i knew i knew once we got to know each other like this and i can't wait to hear Desi's episode but it would all make sense like the kind of clinicians we are the kind of friends we are and the kind of moms we are like i feel like it all kind of comes together and i love that we're doing this for the first few installments of our podcast because i feel like if people don't know who we are they don't know where we come from then kind of what we say may not connect or click or make sense so i think this is really important as we move forward with this project LIZA: yeah i agree INGRID: well thank you lisa thank you ingrid. (MUSICAL INTERLUDE)

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