Category Archives: Smart is cool

With the release of “The King’s Speech,” stuttering has become a topic of conversation unlike anytime I’ve known in the past. Two of the WCATY students that I interviewed for my book on parenting smart kids had been stutterers.

The first is Angie, whom I’ve written about in previous columns. She was born a crack baby. She came to my attention when she scored a perfect 36 on the ACT English test as an eighth grader. It was from her father and eventually her that I learned of her challenging beginnings. By the time she first came to a WCATY program following her eighth grade year in school, there was no sign of a language problem – and who would have expected it from someone whose talent was so clearly language related.

Angie reported, “My father read to me from day one, and I received speech therapy to help overcome stuttering and slower-than-normal language acquisition. I didn’t understand the reason for these early language experiences at the time but they probably explain my affinity for reading and writing. As a preschooler, I learned to read by memorizing the words of book after book, and by age eight my speech problems had been conquered…. spelling and reading became second nature to me. Although Angie has now graduated from college and speaks eloquently, she still reports, “Writing is my bridge between my unspoken thoughts and the world.”

I’ve recently written about Rand’s ADHD. Rand’s second difference is his stutter, which was very noticeable when he was a high schooler attending WCATY programs, yet barely perceptible when I was interviewing him as a Ph.D. candidate.  “When I was really young,” he explained, “specialists worked with me. Then my parents were told it was essentially gone, that I no longer needed to work with the speech teacher. My parents believed it and dismissed stuttering as a problem that had been solved. However, occasionally my stutter was still there, and as other students noticed small stuttering and made fun of it, it got worse again. In high school, I again took speech therapy.

“What it comes down to is that I talk too fast. If I consciously slow it down, then I do not stutter. But it takes a very conscious effort, which I really despise because if I’m thinking about slowing down my speech, I’m not thinking about other things (this is the kid whose ADD allows him to process 5 different things at a time – and he loves having this ability). The high school speech therapy did slow down my natural pace, and that’s okay. It doesn’t matter to me whether I slow it down or not. I just don’t want to have to think about slowing it down. It seems ridiculous to use developmental energy to slow down my talking when I could be using that energy in better ways. I feel like it makes me think slower to have to consciously talk slower. But if it’s not happening consciously, how fast I’m talking doesn’t affect my thinking.”

Rand no longer worries about his stuttering as long as no one points it out to him, or unless he becomes stuck on a word for more than five seconds. When I mentioned that I could barely detect a stutter as we were talking, but brought it up because of the palpability of the problem earlier, he explained, “It doesn’t happen anywhere near as often now that I have matured and am more confident about what I am saying. I rarely stutter when I am teaching or giving a speech, and I consciously slow down when I am working one to one with a foreign student.” I don’t think he had consciously slowed down his speech with me, but his confidence and maturity were clearly evidenced in his smooth flow of talking. And this was a confidence in himself, not just in mathematics – his area of expertise.