This blog includes occasional commentary on trends in our field, or helpful little tips and snippets.

But we spend most of our time in the members' section of this site, where we help SLPs know the research.
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​What’s the difference between respect and love?
 
Wait—back up. ​Before you go on a tangent of considering every relationship you have, and how they all differ in terms of respect and love, let’s look at just one relationship: your relationship with our field’s science. Our evidence. Do you respect it, or do you love it?
 
I think, for most people, the answer is actually “respect”, not “love”. And I see this as a problem. Here’s why:
 
Respecting our science, to me, means putting it on a pedestal. Knowing it’s highly valuable. Important. Something to be revered. Something to be referenced, whenever possible (Smith, 2017, #pretendcitation).
When a graduate student leaves his or her master’s program with a respect for our field’s science, that’s good. A good thing! But it’s also wholly inadequate. Because it can mean that they leave that science, sitting there on it’s pedestal, and wave a respectful little ‘goodbye,’ before proceeding on with clinical work. (Want a real citation for this blog post? Try this article on how quickly students lose touch with the evidence after grad school.)

So, to me, respect doesn’t cut it, because you can respect something but be completely uninvolved with it. Here's an example: I respect cardiovascular exercise. I am 100% confident it’s good for you, and smart people do it. But me? I don’t do it. I hate that crap, and have zero love for cardiovascular exercise. Cardiovascular exercise and I are entirely uninvolved with one another, but #respect.

So then, love. What does loving our science look like? ​