Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am NOT a good speaker. Somehow words just get tied up when I try to say them. I know what I’m talking about – really – but my mouth fails me and I sound like I’m making it all up. I realize it when I start pontificating on whatever the subject might be. I get bumfuzzled just hearing my own voice and before I know it I’m stammering and stuttering all over the place.
I try to pacify myself by saying “boy, I wish I could talk today”. That usually slows me down and I get the words out a little better. But then it happens: the pause. I’ll start going down the road of a really informative sentence and then – pause – there’s this huge gap and my mind goes blank a little. I start staying short phrases that mean the word I was trying to say. I hate that. I wish there was a cure.
There are not a lot of people in the world who know a particular tid-bit about me… probably just my family. When I was in 4th grade I saw a speech therapist because I had a lisp. There are only fragments of it left in my memory. I remember being taken out of English class to go in this small room with just the therapist and me. I had to do a lot of reading aloud. There was this machine that looked like a typewriter that she fed cards through to record short bits of me speaking. There was a magnetic strip on the back that ‘sampled’ my voice and by running the card through again, played it back. Ultimately, it cured me of the lisp but it also made me fail English that year.
I remember being in my classroom with my mother and my teacher. My mother strongly pursued the avenue of holding me back a year. At that time the school system had nothing in place that said they could hold a student back so my mother lost that particular battle. That summer she constantly asked me to read something – anything – as long as it was left to right, top to bottom. She was so unhappy with the situation that she probably would have let me read my dad’s Playboy magazines just to be able to read.
It was also that year that I go so ‘at ease’ with reading aloud and hearing my voice that teachers would always call on me to read passages to the class. One of my teachers was having us put together a ‘media’ piece (basically, a slide show with accompanying audio) and I was asked to narrate the whole affair. The teacher wrote the script, I read it into a tape recorder and the slide show played on top of it. At the time, that was the height of a technical production.
Maybe I’ve blocked it out but I don’t remember the kids torturing me over having a speech impediment. They tortured me over other things, but not that. Of course, at that time in my life I didn’t speak a whole lot. Maybe I didn’t have much to say… or maybe I had plenty to say but couldn’t get the words out.
Some things never change.
I try to pacify myself by saying “boy, I wish I could talk today”. That usually slows me down and I get the words out a little better. But then it happens: the pause. I’ll start going down the road of a really informative sentence and then – pause – there’s this huge gap and my mind goes blank a little. I start staying short phrases that mean the word I was trying to say. I hate that. I wish there was a cure.
There are not a lot of people in the world who know a particular tid-bit about me… probably just my family. When I was in 4th grade I saw a speech therapist because I had a lisp. There are only fragments of it left in my memory. I remember being taken out of English class to go in this small room with just the therapist and me. I had to do a lot of reading aloud. There was this machine that looked like a typewriter that she fed cards through to record short bits of me speaking. There was a magnetic strip on the back that ‘sampled’ my voice and by running the card through again, played it back. Ultimately, it cured me of the lisp but it also made me fail English that year.
I remember being in my classroom with my mother and my teacher. My mother strongly pursued the avenue of holding me back a year. At that time the school system had nothing in place that said they could hold a student back so my mother lost that particular battle. That summer she constantly asked me to read something – anything – as long as it was left to right, top to bottom. She was so unhappy with the situation that she probably would have let me read my dad’s Playboy magazines just to be able to read.
It was also that year that I go so ‘at ease’ with reading aloud and hearing my voice that teachers would always call on me to read passages to the class. One of my teachers was having us put together a ‘media’ piece (basically, a slide show with accompanying audio) and I was asked to narrate the whole affair. The teacher wrote the script, I read it into a tape recorder and the slide show played on top of it. At the time, that was the height of a technical production.
Maybe I’ve blocked it out but I don’t remember the kids torturing me over having a speech impediment. They tortured me over other things, but not that. Of course, at that time in my life I didn’t speak a whole lot. Maybe I didn’t have much to say… or maybe I had plenty to say but couldn’t get the words out.
Some things never change.