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From: Reuben Schuff
Date: 22 Oct 2009
Time: 00:05:03 -0500
Remote Name: 74.109.5.185
Samantha, Two tough questions. First, turning points. As I reflect, I can point to some moments that stand out, but there haven’t been any light bulbs. It’s been a process; sometimes that process has moved forward, other times, its felt like a spiraled backwards. My journey to maturing into an adult who stutters has been going on since about my sophomore year of college when I showed up at the speech clinic in the basement of Heavilon Hall and continues to this day. Since then, I’ve been privileged to work with two amazing SPL’s at Purdue and University of Maryland, more than a dozen graduate SLP students, some awesome adult groups of people who stutter, an army of people at the NSA, both locally and nationally, and many wonderful friends supporting my life. All of this fed me with changes and continues to do so. Next question, advise to students studying to be SLPs working with people who stutter? Understand you’re not going to FIX most people in a semester. Understand it’s actually not your job to fix anything. You are a teacher, you might get an hour or two a week with each person. There are 168 in each week. If you get 2 of those hours, your job is to help people understand what to do with the other 166 (I do encourage using a few of sleep) Understand stuttering. UNDERSTAND IT. not just intellectually, but cognitively, and emotionally. Understand that stuttering more than what you hear. Understand what it means to order a sandwich at Subway and struggle so badly that the clerk fills in what he or she thinks you want and then begs you to just point as the line of people behind you looks at you like you have two heads and a tail. Understand what it means to struggle so badly making a phone call to set up a doctor’s appointment that they hang up on you and won’t answer the phone when you call back. Go out and stutter, struggle, and see what happens, and do it until you understand it. Good luck! Reuben