Stammering or stuttering is a hidden disability that affects about 70 million people worldwide - roughly 1 per cent of the population. It cuts across all boundaries, every social position, race, ethnicity, job or personality. Every language has a word for it: for example, bégaiement (French), tartamudez (Spanish), hakalaanaa (Hindi), hau hick (Cantonese), domori (Japanese) and nsu (Nigerian Igbo).
Stuttering is a neurological condition, and there is something fundamentally different about the brains of people who stutter, compared with the brains of those who don’t. There is an abnormality in a region of the brain known as the arcuate fasciculus. This bundle of nerve fibres provides a communication conduit for signals between parts of the rear brain and parts of the front brain known to be involved in speech production. Normally, the neural “wiring” in the arcuate fasciculus splits into several branches at the rear of the brain. In the vast majority of stutterers, there seems to be a missing branch of neural connections.
As a result of these fibres being missing, stuttering occurs, in the form of repeated sounds or words, or in chest freezing (the inability to speak). When people who stammer become aware that they do, this is generally when the problem manifests itself and different behaviours occur. These behaviours could include leg-slapping to get words out, changing words or making things up in a bid to communicate.
For stutterers, speaking can be difficult, and social situations tricky. The pressure can result in a person freezing and not talking at all. With that in your head, think about a busy day in school and how demanding teaching can be as a “talking job”. Then think of me: a person who stutters who is also a teacher.
I chose to teach after struggling with my speech through school and college. Initially, I opted for a college course that I thought would involve little or no speaking to audiences. An encounter with a therapy approach called the McGuire Programme helped me massively and allowed me to retrain as a teacher, with the key being accepting who I was and embracing my stutter.
On my teaching journey, there have been some massive highs regarding my speech. As a teacher with an interest in inclusive pedagogy, I’m trained in Maths Recovery and Cognitively Guided Instruction. After using these techniques in my classroom for a number of years, I was asked to present on pedagogy and practice at a teaching conference, representing the local authority. For me, this was big. The authority had looked past my stutter and had seen the knowledge and expertise I could bring - it was a proud moment.
I’ve also presented research from my master’s-level qualification at academic conferences, where delegates were more interested in the content than how it was delivered. Having the confidence to speak at such events has made me hugely proud.
Other speaking highs come every day in the classroom: when I read the register, converse with a child or do a bit of silly role-playing. These are all things that I wouldn’t have thought I was capable of doing previously.
However, with stuttering, there are always moments when you can be ambushed by the condition, and this happened to me in March this year. I was reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to my class when, all of a sudden, I hit a wall and was really struggling with “Charlie Bucket”, “Willy Wonka”, “Grandpa Joe” and “factory”. I started to panic and could see that my class were a little confused. I ended up closing the book and moving on. It wasn’t a good day for me. I was embarrassed and a little ashamed and, for the first time in years, felt as though I had been beaten by my stammer. I made 75 phone calls to hotels and restaurants to practise the sounds I was struggling with and then read those pages over again to cancel out the stammer. I managed to turn what was a really negative moment into one that I had control over.
Over the years, I’ve not yet had a negative experience with a pupil due to my stuttering. I talk to the children at the start of the academic year (and often throughout) about my stammer, and make reference to the fact that I speak a little differently. I read them a story about a dinosaur who stammers and we then talk about it. The questions the children come up with are amazing. A child once asked if stuttering hurt me. Another asked if I liked having a stutter.
The discussion we have around questions like these means that the children understand what I’m dealing with and, therefore, see past it. They see me as a teacher and not a person who stutters. It is refreshing and, every year, I feel the same way.
When I first started teaching, I thought parents wouldn’t want to see someone who stuttered. However, as I’ve grown in the profession, I now choose to present myself as a person who stutters - and it doesn’t change how parents feel about me as an educator. In fact, in some cases the parents actually really like it. Their child is seeing a teacher as a person with real-life quirks (just like we all have) and not some perfect robot who doesn’t make mistakes. It is important for children to see this, and many parents are happy that their child is getting that on a daily basis from me. A parent once said to me that my story of overcoming adversity to do a job that I loved gave her hope for her child’s future.
The biggest thing for me has been accepting myself as a person with a stutter. Once I managed to do that, I started to live a more fulfilling life and, in turn, became the teacher I wanted to be. As ever, my message to any teacher would be to embrace your quirks - they make you who you are. Not only that, but they also inspire and normalise things for the children in our care.
Adam Black is a teacher at Eastmuir School, a Glasgow primary for children with additional support needs
