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From: Brienne Worek, WVU Grad student
Date: 08 Oct 2009
Time: 18:00:00 -0500
Remote Name: 24.131.121.25
I took my first class in speech pathology as a junior in college, Introduction to Communication Disorders, when I met my "first stutterer". It seems almost unbelievable that I had never come across a person who stutters before, but I had gone through the first 21 years of my life without ever meeting one. Up until that point, my closest familiarity with a stutterer was Porky Pig. Keeping that in mind, I had never thought much of stuttering, and my only memories of it were for the purpose of comedy. So, one day in my Intro. class we had a guest speaker: a stutterer, who I'll refer to as John. He looked like a normal guy and was about my age, but as soon as he opened his mouth to speak, her started to stutter. I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but my initial reaction was to laugh. I did not laugh, thank goodness, but as I listened to John's story I began to realize how ignorant I was to something that is more common of a problem than a lot of people realize. And hearing John's story and all of the difficulties he had come across because of his stuttering, it brought me to tears. What I'm leading into is that I think one of the biggest problems with attitudes towards stuttering, whether it be with children/teens/adults/or monkeys, is that if the public are not properly educated on the subject matter, then they will react with what they've seen in the past. In my first semester as a therapy assistant in my school's speech clinic, wouldn't you know that I received a stutterer as my first client. Now that I was more educated on stuttering and its possible causes, it was important for me to look deeper into the emotional side of my client. She would often talk about how frustrated she got if people questioned her stuttering or asked "what wrong with her". I would say to her that even if she did nothing more than honestly and sincerely talk to people about her stuttering, then, like me, they too would realize that she is just like everyone else, except that it might take her longer, for whatever reason, to "get the words out". Throughout her years in therapy, other than techniques to get her to stutter less, the education she gained about her own stuttering could start an amazing chain reaction if she could influence every person that questions her.