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From: Russ Hicks
Date: 19 Oct 2005
Time: 18:21:56 -0500
Remote Name: 67.166.234.106
Hi Vanessa, .... I agree with you about it making soooo much sense. However I can personally testify that when I was going through therapy - a primitive form of fluency shaping way back in the 1950's - that the concept of the iceberg occurred to no one, absolutely NO ONE. Not even ME in all my brilliance! <grin> .... My guess is that the alternate view of CONTROLLING your stuttering was so obvious, and seemed to work SO WELL at least in the short term, that any other view was superfluous. I got back from intense therapy sessions for FOUR YEARS each summer and by golly I was cured each time! By talking extremely slowly (yada, yada, yada), I was 100% fluent. "All" I needed to do was to simply keep that up and "learn to talk" this new way. My failure to do this was just proof that I wasn't working hard enough, didn't want it bad enough, wasn't smart enough, etc., and that fundamentally it was MY FAULT that it didn't work for me. It obviously worked for SOME people (I guess), but for those of us who failed, we simply accepted the fact that we needed to try again - or simply give up altogether. .... I liken Joe Sheehan's concept of the iceberg to a magical "ah HA!" moment where a totally different idea finally clicked in his head. Maybe it was like Galileo's idea of the earth revolving around the sun when it appeared totally obvious to everyone else that the sun revolved around the earth. It certainly appeared that way! But once people understood the truth of that idea, it now seems foolish that people took so long to see that. Well duh! But read in your history books what happened to Galileo and how long it took for people to accept the truth of that new concept - and how hard it was for the old ideas to die out. Man...! People are simply reluctant to accept concepts when old ideas SEEM to explain things so well - at least for some people. Hey, ask the captain of the Titanic about the concept of the "unsinkable ship!" Talk about an "ah HA!" moment! .... The concept of the MATRIX - the graphs of the relationship between the top and bottom of the iceberg - is far less of an "ah HA" moment than it is an intellectual exercise based on the initial concept of the iceberg. I liken this to maybe the development of orbital mechanics based on Galileo's concept of the earth revolving around the sun. It still amazes me that people can land a probe on Mars by launching a rocket from the earth years before! Golly... Did you ever see Apollo 13? That's just beyond amazing. But all that is just an extension of the original idea of the sun revolving around the earth. .... I really like the statement "I can reach so high because I stand on the shoulders of giants." That's what education is really all about. SLPs of your generation, Vanessa, can reach so high because of the work of giants like Joe Sheehan. What is obvious to you - with what you know now - was NOT obvious to people years ago. The water below the surface of the iceberg is inky black, and in retrospect it's not hard to see that well meaning people of long ago simply could NOT see beneath that surface. And what you cannot see just didn't exist. Amazing, isn't it? .... Good luck in school Vanessa. You have the kind of mind which can accept new ideas and build on them. You can really stand on the shoulders of giants! .... I hope our paths cross some day. .... Russ