As I approached the first day of teaching my writing course, there was a healthy balance of excitement and anxiety coursing through my veins. But the first-day jitters weren’t for the reason that you would expect. Yes, I worried about how my inaugural class would go. But, above all, I was concerned about how the energetic group of 25 students would react to my speech disability.
What if they doubt my capabilities as their teacher?
What if they think I don’t know what I’m talking about?
I’d done one-to-one tutoring sessions before, but this was the first time I was teaching a classroom full of students. It was an online class through the Blanche MacDonald Centre, a career college in Vancouver and I was teaching from the other side of the country in Toronto.
The fact that it was online intensified my anxiety as I felt like my speech disability was on display as a floating head talking to my students. It would have been different if it was in-person where I could have relied on body language as well.
I’ve had a speech disability since I was 3 years old. To be precise, my speech disability manifests as stuttering — or rather, the involuntary disruption of words through prolongations, repetitions and pauses.
Think “Mmmmy name is Ssssssamuel” or “H-h-h-h-ello, h-h-h-h-how are you?”
It’s not dissimilar to the speech impediment of the beloved pants-less Looney Tunes character Porky Pig. “Th-th-th-that’s all, folks!”
Despite the prevalence of stuttering — the Stuttering Foundation of America estimates that 1 percent of people worldwide stutter — the speech disability remains shrouded in mystery as one of many disabilities plagued by social stigma and misconceptions.
So, as I used to wonder to myself, how am I supposed to be an effective teacher when I have trouble speaking? This internal belief about myself — which I had maintained well into my adult years — was supported by the external judgments that able-bodied people often voiced to me, particularly about the kind of job they thought I should have.
“I don’t think you should be in front of a classroom,” one of my former teachers told me, “especially with a stutter.”
However, when I first started teaching my writing course two years ago, my tenure was coupled with a recent acceptance of my disability and a career in accessibility justice. At this point, I was open about my speech disability and I advocated for myself in the workplace.
But those intrusive, what-if thoughts still lingered at the back of my mind. Because as frustrating as it is not to be able to say what you want to say when you want to say it, more frustrating is navigating the perceptions — and potential negative reactions — that people might have about you. And this isn’t limited to stuttering, but disability in general.
The fact remains that we don’t talk about disability enough in the classroom. It isn’t normalized and it should be. This is precisely why I started disclosing my stuttering to my students. It served as both a way for me to challenge those what-if thoughts and put myself at ease, as well as a foundation for establishing a conversation about disability in the classroom.
So at the start of the term I made it a priority to disclose my speech disability. I even went the extra mile and cracked a joke about it.
“You might hear that I’m talking a little differently. I stutter. So we’re going to be here for quite a while,” I quipped. My students started to laugh.
I like to incorporate humor when I talk about my stuttering as a means to help shake off people’s concerns about disability and to put them more at ease. I mean, it definitely puts me more at ease as I begin teaching. But more importantly, I believe it sets a tone that disability isn’t something to shy away from — that in order to break down the stigmas surrounding disability it needs to be welcomed into our lives, into our conversations and into our classrooms.
To my surprise, my students began to show a blend of curiosity and appreciation. Some of them proceeded to ask me questions about what it’s like to have a stutter.
Do you stutter more in specific social situations?
What about on specific words?
What does it feel like when you stutter?
Hearing their questions was music to my ears. To me, their curiosity served as an indication that not only did they look past my speech disability, but they wanted to know more about it. My disclosure turned into a conversation about stuttering, which proceeded to take up a quarter of the class. This meant that disability was out in the open.
Later, I received an email from one of my students expressing gratitude that I shared my disability, which prompted the student to then open up about their learning disability.
This is why, instead of shying away from my speech disability or agonizing over those what-if thoughts about potentially negative reactions to it, I chose to be transparent about my stuttering. By not speaking up about our lived experiences with disability, we inadvertently perpetuate the social stigma. It’s through disclosure that we begin to have conversations that serve to normalize disability.
I may have been a tad reluctant to disclose my speech disability, but I have no doubt that choosing to disclose my speech disability made me a better educator.