Because I Stutter

[ Contents | Search | Reply | Next | Previous | Up ]


Re: WELCOME!

From: Russ Hicks
Date: 15 Oct 2006
Time: 18:57:01 -0500
Remote Name: 71.252.204.114

Comments

Hi Jen again <smile>, ..... In answer to your question, No, I never received any other formal therapy than my years at the speech camp in Michigan. During the winter when camp wasn't in session, I did see an individual "speech correctionist" (as we called them back then) at home. But we used the camp material and followed the camp guidelines exactly. So the bottom line is that I spent nearly eight years (ages 10 to 17) rigidly following a strict, albeit primitive, fluency shaping regimen. ..... All that being said there is a minor addendum to that statement. When I was at Purdue University in about 1960, I took a speech pathology class from Joe Sheehan (in the early years before he became an icon in the field of stuttering) because both Joe and I were interested in techie stuff. (And to be honest, because the girls in Joe's class were the best looking girls at Purdue!) I was an electrical engineering student (a true geek), and Joe and I experimented with a very early version of a delayed auditory feedback machine using a reel-to-reel tape recorder with two recording and playback heads, one fixed, and the other movable. We discovered that my speech became nearly fluent at a delay of about 40 milliseconds while it destroyed the speech of my fluent classmates. We had great fun with that phenomena. <grin> But it was totally impractical because the machine weighed nearly 100 pounds! As far as I know Joe never pursued that technology. And I dropped out of anything to do with stuttering until about 1984 when I joined the NSA. And shortly thereafter I joined Toastmasters and was never again really interested in improving my FLUENCY. I worked on my COMMUNICATION skills instead. ..... And at Purdue when Joe and I talked (more like friends than a therapist and client) he did mention that he thought stuttering was really okay and we'd all be better off he we just relaxed and opened up with our stuttering rather than trying to control our stuttering and doing everything we possibly could NOT to stutter. (Joe stuttered too, by the way.) But this was a radical thought in stuttering therapy in those days and I never really followed his advice on that. It was about ten years later in 1970 that he published those thoughts as the stuttering iceberg. See my paper on the stuttering iceberg at http://www.mnsu.edu/comdis/isad6/papers/hicks6.html for details of this. ..... To complete this picture, by the time I got into the NSA in about 1984, I became surrounded by a bunch of experts in the stuttering community and got "therapy by osmosis" I guess you could say. ..... I wish you the very best in school and in life, Jen! ..... Russ


Last changed: 10/23/06