Unearthing a Relic

 

While cleaning out my basement, I uncovered this treasure.  It's my Peabody Articulation Decks.  If you remember these, you are probably in your fifties or older.  

I own this kit for one reason and one reason only, I was required to buy it.  During one of my clinical classes, we were required to buy this kit which was pretty expensive for its time.  I think it was over $100. Alternatively, we could make our own.  

Making your own kit in the late eighties and early nineties was no easy feat. There were computers and printers but no internet that was accessible to the average person.  Digital images were in their infancy. Making 10 decks of articulation cards would involve looking through magazines and newspapers or whatever other printed materials you could find and searching frantically for pictures of objects that had the appropriate sounds in them.  That meant finding 10 pictures of items with /g/ at the beginning of the word, 10 with /g/ in the middle of the word, and 10 with /g/ at the end. Then you had to cut out the pictures and glue them onto index cards. Then simply repeat for each of the sounds in the English language.  Oh, and keep up with your reading, studying, clinic patients, and projects.  Like most people in the class, I bit the bullet and bought the kit.  And, when I say I, I really mean that I begged my mother for the money.  

Those of us who took the "easy" way out and bought the kit were harshly chastised by our graduate assistant who had made her own kit when she was an undergrad.  "I cut my butt off for months," she said not really selling us on why it was better to make your own kit.  

Once I started working, I did actually use the kit and I can assure you that it was a relic even back then.  One thing we did have in the 90s was CDs but the /r/ card deck had "record player" as one of the target words.  "Roller skate" was also a target word and depicted a skate from the 70s in the age of rollerblades.  All of the people pictured in the deck looked and dressed as if they were straight out of the 1950s.  To its credit, at least the people pictured on the cards weren't all white.  They did have some people of color represented.

In addition to the dated appearance, even back then, many of the target words were terrible.  Let's revisit "record player".  If you are working on /r/ you've got an initial /r/, a medial vowel controlled /r/, and a final /r/ all in the same word.  There's an /l/ blend thrown in for good measure. Definitely not a target that you would work on very often due to the many challenges it presents.  

Despite its negatives, I used this Peabody kit quite a bit. It was handy when the copy machine went down and I couldn't run off my targets for my next session.  It was there when therapy times got switched around and I had to see a student unexpectedly.  But, over time, it got used less and less as I learned more about how to coax speech sounds from children with the most challenging articulation problems.  

And so, today I bid farewell to the Peabody Articulation Decks.  I will never again see that neon green box beckoning me from the shelf in my office.  I will never again have to try and carefully seat the decks into the box so that the lid will close, not a task for the impatient. In fact, I will never again close the box because the latch tore off about 2 years ago.  Goodbye old friend.