[ Contents | Search | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: Barb Wimpee
Date: 14 Oct 2005
Time: 06:29:20 -0500
Remote Name: 69.76.71.129
Sorry it took me so long to respond. One of my daughters got married last Saturday and another one left for French Guiana this morning. Anyway, you must remember I am 51, so speech therapy was really archaic for stuttering when I was going in the early 60s. They had me crawling around on the floor of a broom closet when I was in first grade. I think there was some theory about going through all of your developmental stages again and maybe that would cure the stuttering. The whole time I was thinking the speech therapist was crazy. It is interesting to note that I was in a very small room, which, looking back on it, shows how important the school thought the speech therapist was...no planning for such things at the school in terms of space... Another memory is practicing my sounds, like Ch, Sh, Th, and so on. This was done during my favorite math time in 4th grade on a cafeteria stage behind the curtain with very low light. It is a very "dark" memory. Once again, I was thinking the speech therapist had no clue what to do with me. In high school, the school speech therapist told me that since I was 15 months younger than my sister,I was obviously not planned and, therefore, probably not loved and that was the root of my stuttering problem. I was sassy by that time and told her to f*** off and never returned to speech therapy again. That was 1969. I would hope that today's speech therapy would not be a waste of a person's time. I should definitely re-introduce myself to the field and see if it is something that I could learn from at this point in my life. Thanks, Barb