Question for PWS
Hi. My name is Brandi. My classmates Laurel, Caitlin, and I are second-year SLP grad students. Did anyone have classroom accommodations in school for their stutter? For example, being allowed to turn in a video of you presenting a presentation instead of having to present it live. If so, what were your accommodations? How did they make you feel? Did you find them helpful? Embarrassing? Or something else? Did you not have any accommodations but wished your school SLP would have advocated for you to have some? Thanks!
Hi Brandi,
Thank you for your question.
In our history class in junior high, we played a Reach for the Top-type game. My teacher asked the timekeeper to give me extra time when answering. Sometimes I didn’t need it, but that accommodation helped my confidence.
I didn’t have any option to record a presentation beforehand but, in fairness, I never asked for it. I also grew up in the 90s where one of the few options was a big video camera, which cost nearly $1000 at the time.
That’s more or less the extent of school but my workplace could not be more accommodating. Thanks to GChat, chat functions in Zoom, Google Docs projected on screens, my employers and colleagues have given me every opportunity to communicate in a different way if I couldn’t speak as fluently as I wanted to.
Hope this helps.
Ryan
Thank you for these interesting questions.
In public school, when the other students gave oral reports, I was usually given the choice of a written report or an oral report. I appreciated being given this choice, as my stuttering is severe. However – and this is a big however – I always chose to give an oral report when given this choice in public school. Yes, I usually stuttered severely during these reports. But I didn’t want to be regarded as different from the other kids in this respect; if the other kids were required to do something, I wanted to do the same thing. My public school classmates and teachers were patient with my stuttering, and understood that I had a speech difference. And they respected me for other reasons (a reputation for intellectual and musical abilities).
You ask about the school SLP’s. I had six years of therapy with school speech therapists (they weren’t called SLP’s back then) – but I found none of them to be helpful to me. This was the early 1960’s, and childhood stuttering therapy hadn’t yet developed into what it is today. The therapists really had no idea what to do for severe stuttering. I was often grouped together with the articulation kids, practicing various sounds, but I knew even back then that this wasn’t my problem.
I was a student for a very long time – I had many years of university education, with over a decade of graduate studies in various fields. Through those years I often had very severe stuttering. And that period (mostly during the 1870’s and 1980’s) was largely before modern disability laws. So universities in the U.S. were not required by law to provide special accommodations.
Yet interestingly, I was given some special accommodations out of a sense of fairness. For example, in oral comprehensive examinations I was given extra time. In one case, I was allowed to do a written report instead of an oral presentation for a comprehensive exam (and unlike in public school, I did accept this offer, as so much was at stake).
In one advanced graduate seminar, where students presented oral papers on high-level research and analysis, I was allowed to write out my report and have another grad student read it to the seminar. That approach worked out best for all concerned – I wouldn’t have to spend time struggling (and the seminar time was quite limited), and also the other students could better concentrate on the material rather than on my speech.
So my approach was different in graduate school than it had been years earlier in public school. In looking back, I think I made wise decisions during both these periods, to fit the particular school environment involved.
Hi Brandi,
This is a good question.
Apart from the fact that I knew I stammered, I knew very little about stammering, so I didn’t even know there were accommodations available when I was in school. Discussing school SLP? There weren’t any in Ghana at the time, but there might be a handful in certain “privileged” schools presently. Because I was good at hiding my stammer at the time, I was able to navigate the educational system just like any other student. But I would have asked for accommodations, especially with regard to reading in class if I had known then what I know now.
Best,
Elias.
Hi Brandi
When I was a child I wasn’t given accomodation. On the contrary. I had great grades on written exams, but the lowest grades on oral exams, as “I hadn’t done my homework”, simply because I couldn’t get the words out. Years later I went back to school, as I had immigrated and wanted to learn my new language. I asked to present for my teacher only, which was accepted. I put so much time and effort in my presentation and felt really proud. But I stuttered a lot. Afterwards the teacher told me my presentation was fantastic, but… it took too long time, so she downgraded me…
We should have the right to say as much as others, just as we adjust for people with other disabilities. And with modern technique, you can record yourself on forhand, instead of standing in front of the class. You can use powerpoint, so that the focus is not on you, but on your slides. You can raise your hand when you know the answer and want to say it, it raise a fist when you know, but don’t want to talk. There are so many small ways to help a student who stutters, that a free and don’t take mich effort. But some teachers think it’s not a problem (to whom? did you ask your student?), or think they need to follow rules and regulations saying you must pass oral exams fluently.
We need to bring more SLPs and PWS to schools to educate teachers. So they can lift their students up to their full potential.
Keep them talking
Anita