From the time she was young, Leah Beekman knew she would take an unorthodox path in life. What she couldn’t have imagined as a youngster with a reading disorder is that she would dedicate her career to researching language, specifically the unchartered area of sarcasm.
“Sarcasm has gotten a really bad reputation. It is not bad,” she stated. “Language isn’t always concrete. When a child learns humor and sarcasm, it is positively reinforced. We often use sarcasm in very tense situations. When we are experiencing high emotions, we may not be comfortable so we use sarcasm to break the tension.”
A CHILDHOOD OF BEING DIFFERENT
She was born in Middletown, Ohio and spent her childhood in nearby Hunter. “There was no post office, no stop light, and one elementary school I didn’t go to. Our postal address was Franklin,” recounted Beekman, whose parents met when her mother was a teenager and her father was fresh out of the navy. “I grew up in a very traditional family as the youngest of five children. My dad was this 6-foot-6 dark haired, dark eyed man in a navy uniform and my mom eventually dropped out of college to get married and have babies.”
“I was expected to get married and have children and stay close. I was not going to follow that trajectory,” she continued. “I liked climbing trees, playing football, and traveling.”
Her reading disorder became evident in the first grade. “I could read, but not understand. I went to private schools, where I received a lot of help,” she explained. “I saw a reading specialist from first through sixth grade, learning to decode and understand. I didn’t love school.”
In addition to her reading challenges, she nearly failed sixth grade math. “In seventh grade, I had a phenomenal math teacher and pulled straight A’s. I started to come into my own in middle school,” she recalled. “I really got more into theater. I could do really well in costume on stage, as long as it’s not just me. I could memorize and perform.”
A pivotal moment in her education came when she was assigned a book report in the eighth grade. “I hated book reports, but there was no restriction on what we could read,” she remembered. “I chose The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which was at a third-grade reading level. I understood the story and was completely enthralled. I realized I could be transported to this magical world. I determined reading is pretty great!”
HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE
Her eighth grade English teacher was also her guidance counselor in high school and offered Beekman and her best friend a volunteer job for the summer. “There was a local therapy center for kids with special needs. The guidance counselor thought we would be good,” Beekman recollected. “We got a full introduction to speech language issues. We had a blast with community outing groups, swimming, shopping, running car washes, making pizza, and making puppets. We did this all through our high school summers.”
Beekman had set her sights on being a pediatric psychiatrist so she was surprised when her guidance counselor thought she would be going into a field related to the volunteering. “I wasn’t thinking that at all,” she expressed. “All of a sudden, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life!”
What Beekman did know was that she wanted to travel. She went out of the country with a college group when she was 15 so it seemed natural to her to accept a one-year college experience in Argentina at the age of nineteen. “From playing sports, I ripped my shoulder muscle in half and had to have surgery. The recovery was long so I had to postpone the trip.”
She worked during that time and took a few online classes before spending a year in Argentina as originally scheduled. “It was life-changing to be in a different environment, but I was still disoriented about what to do with my life,” she explained. “When I returned, I didn’t fit back in with my friends. I had changed a lot.”
Wanting to take a year to figure out her next step, Beekman took a job as a full-time nanny in New Jersey. She spent one year with that family and then eight years with another family who had a baby at the time she started. “They became like my second family. I tell people that I grew up in Ohio, but I matured in New Jersey,” she commented. “It was during this time that I chose to do speech language pathology. I wanted to help little kids with special needs.”
SARCASM
Sarcasm has always been a part of Beekman’s life. “I come from an incredibly sarcastic family. You either got it or you got berated,” she noted. “It was something that got me in trouble in school. I had a few detentions here and there. It was what I was used to. My mom would sign report cards Martha Washington, saying they wouldn’t look anyway. If we had a teacher named Mrs. Long, she would sign Mrs. Short.”
“My entire family is very witty and quick-tongued.” Beekman stated. “I have always loved humor, sarcasm, and jokes that are play on words. One the family favorites was always, “time flies like arrows, fruit flies like bananas.”
Beekman earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from William Paterson University of New Jersey, where she put in 100 hours of clinical work and 300 more hours off campus in speech language pathology, all very heavily supervised. She moved on to her Clinical Fellowship Year, which is generally nine months of full-time work with limited supervision.
She ended up in a school setting, filling in for two teachers who took maternity leaves. She first worked with children with autism. That position ended on a Friday and the next one started on that Monday, where she worked as a speech pathologist at a Weehawken Public School.
“I worked with all sorts of kids with various language disorders, not severely disabled. There are a lot of overlooked language disorders because they can function well until the third grade. At that point, you transition from learning to read to reading to learn,” she explained. “I had conversations with so many students telling them that I knew exactly what they were going through. I know what it means to read and have no idea what you have just read.”
Beekman was working with both middle school and high school students. “One day a sixth-grader was very distraught and I asked her what was wrong,” she recalled. “She told me, ‘I just realized that all of these girls I thought were my friends were using sarcasm against me and were not actually my friends.’ First, I got mad at them and then at myself. I was so focused on academic language. I had neglected social communication. Many of us do this and forget it is within our scope of practice.”
She realized there were not books or resources that dealt with sarcasm in an academic setting. “We are so focused on state testing. We prepare students for that,” Beekman stated. “We forget that they can’t socialize on the playgrounds and have no humor skills.”
Beekman sprang into action. “I was thinking, ‘Someone should do something.’ Then I decided I was going to do something about this. I had always thought of getting a doctorate,” she expressed. “I went to open houses for doctorate studies and said I wanted to study sarcasm and its impact on young students.”
“We need to teach sarcasm. It is not going away. People will not stop being sarcastic. It is not always used negatively. It can be used as a bonding experience. I love to use the Vance & Wells (1994) study as an example in which they state that humor is the currency of the playground. Kids like to play with language and manipulate it.”
Of course, sarcasm can be used to be mean and hurtful as well and that contributes to the negative connotations associated with it. “Kids use it for play and also to be jerks. People don’t always use the nice, playful sarcasm. It can be biting with mean undertones,” she acknowledged. “We use it in mean ways, but we also use it positively and to connect with others. Either way kids need to be able to understand it.”
She interviewed with schools about her intended doctorate study, but found they were not on board with the concept, saw no value in it, or had no advisor to fit. “Case Western Reserve University was suggested to me. After the first interview, I knew it was the most brilliant fit ever and my mentor was great and supportive, fully on board,” Beekman said enthusiastically. “The long journey was beginning to blossom.”
“What I found was not only are kids very teachable regarding sarcasm, but they were already using it in natural settings. I developed a pre-test and post-test of other ambiguous language like oxymorons, metaphor, and multiple meaning words,” she commented. “I was confident that if I focused on one form of ambiguous language, academic performance would improve in the other forms of ambiguous language. For most of my students, it did. They couldn’t give a lot of definitions, but sarcasm intervention and manipulating language, their post-test score was increased. We often drill one form at a time, but even when we focus on one, it is naturally helping another.”
She is continuing to tweak her intervention so that she can put it in the hands of speech-language pathologists. “It has been tested and we have the research. We have a lot of other interventions that are not tested or tested in only children with autism,” she said. “We want to test on other populations to be able to say, ‘This is the population it works for.’ It may only work with certain types of children, but we need to know if it works, which it does.”
Beekman worked with a family who has a daughter who is has high-functioning autism who would not speak at dinner due to the high volume of sarcasm that the family uses. “After the intervention, she could talk to us and them. Her academics were secondary to her being able to communicate with them according to her father,” she relayed. “It is rewarding when a student says that the intervention is helping and they say, ‘I knew how to respond. I knew they were being sarcastic.’ The father also came in every week excited to report instances of his daughter using and understanding sarcasm.”
“Whenever I give talks on sarcasm, people who come to the session tell me how happy they are that someone is researching this,” she remarked. “Teachers tell me they have kids in their classroom who can’t relate to sarcasm and they don’t know what to do to address the problem. Most people have been very grateful for my area of study. Only rarely does someone say that I shouldn’t be teaching this because it is mean. I tell parents to treat sarcasm like humor. You wouldn’t tell your children not to be funny.”
She has presented her intervention at state and national conferences. The intervention is mostly developed already and a case study of the intervention due in October to be published in December.
CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY AND CHAPMAN UNIVERSITY
Fortunately for Beekman, she was invited to work with Dr. Angela Ciccia, a well-renowned professor whose research focuses on factors that impact children’s ability to recovery/develop in the presence of a diagnosis of an acquired (i.e., new onset) and/or developmental neurogenic communication disorder.
“She is a brilliant woman who was also studying some novel interventions and invited me to take on that part of her lab. She is the expert,” Beekman articulated. “She is working on telehealth, a new way of testing inner city kids at risk. I wanted to come up with a novel intervention and worked on that while in her lab.”
“In the profession of speech-language pathology, where applied clinical research is of critical importance yet in critical shortage, it is exciting to work with someone that is truly focused on this in her work,” Dr. Ciccia said. “Dr. Leah’s work lives in this spot, balancing the rigor of research, the needs of clients that receive services, and the real-life implementation constraints for clinicians. It is work like this that will help bridge the research-practice timeline and more quickly translate into clinical implementation. Her passion for the children that drive her to do this work is palpable. I know she has an exciting career in front of her!”
Two years into her doctorate, Beekman was asked what she was going to do with her PhD. “People assumed a tenured track and research. This is the highest degree so I wanted to achieve the best. I wanted to be the expert, not an academic,” she explained. “I was originally planning to go into private practice in New Jersey. As part of the doctorate program, you are required to teach. I was a TA (teacher’s assistant) a couple times and taught once and realized I loved it! I love teaching. One time I had a massive issue with a disrespectful student. Handling that was so empowering. It was invigorating to teach.”
Much like her senior year in high school, she was left confounded as to what to do next, albeit this time with a PhD and a wealth of experience. “Then Angela told me that I could be a clinical professor and teach in both the clinic and the classroom. I didn’t know I could do both,” Beekman commented. “I remember learning so much from my professors in New Jersey who taught in the hospital and the classroom.”
She began searching for a non-tenured track and submitting her resume on a speech-language pathology website. She went on interviews at several different universities.
“Having a doctorate in speech-language pathology is rare. For one thing, you can make more money with a master’s degree than a PhD working clinically, sometimes twice as much. That’s fairly well know, so that can be a deterrents for some people” Beekman described. “I never went into the field for the money. I just love what I do.”
Beekman saw a trend as she went on multiple interviews at colleges. “Universities go through trends of people retiring all around the same time. I always seemed to be the first of a new faculty or the last of an older faculty,” she laughed. “At my first interview, I was the youngest by 30 years. I figured there are not people who are going to go snowboarding or backpacking with me.”
One interview went extremely well. “The people were lovely and the faculty had mostly transitioned into a young, awesome group. I was thinking I could work here,” she recollected. “It made the decision tough because I really loved another university and their faculty as well.”
Prior to going on an interview in California she meet with nine different universities in a series of pre-interviews, at a national conference in Boston. “I had visited California before, but didn’t know about living there. I am an East coast kind of woman,” she recalled. “When I interviewed at Chapman University, everything about it was amazing: the students, the clinic, the job description. The dean was a woman who is really into hiking and backpacking so we talked about that a lot. At Chapman, the discussion was a lot about what I like to do outside of work. That’s what they wanted to know. They had already read my resume and papers. They wanted to get to know me.”
Beekman was highly interested in Chapman, but the in person interview sealed the deal for her. “They drove me to the ocean to see how close it was and we took a walk on the beach,” she recounted. “They told me about hiking trails, kayaking, skateboarding, great restaurants, and where to get an apartment. They talked about ‘when I got there’, not ‘if’, saying, ‘When you get here, this is what it will be like. We anticipate you will have a private practice and that you will continue that clinical work.’”
Eventually, she was extended an official offer and naturally accepted. She will be teaching master’s students. “My research will be on hold for now so I can get my legs for teaching. I was handed a textbook and the rest is up to me,” she explained. “I will be a clinical supervisor when the students are learning in the clinic. I will engage with them, sharing what they did well and what they can do better. I will teach in the classroom and then go to the clinic. A total dream job!”
Regardless of whether she is actively researching, Beekman will keep teaching people the importance of sarcasm. “I have been doing it five years and I like to be fun and creative,” she expressed. “The difficult part is to keep it fresh and challenging, to seek to be the best at what you do.”