That Day Last Week When I Cried In Front of My Class

The response to my TEDx talk at TEDxYouth@SanDiego has been overwhelming and humbling, especially from students, former students, and my school community.  The journey that led me to share my story on that stage has been a long and difficult one, but what an awesome opportunity to share in that way.

In the past two weeks, I have been able to show the talk in my classroom to about 250 students who I currently teach.  In each class, I gave the students the opportunity to ask me any questions about the talk.  In some cases, the Q&A session lasted over an hour.  I was blown away by their questions.  It’s one of the most memorable moments I have had in 14 years of teaching. 

The two groups of students who asked the most meaningful and personal questions were my advanced students who have known me the longest, including some students who were in my class when I was struggling with my speech, and the special education students whose questions often seemed to have personal meaning for them based on their own challenges.  An example: “Knowing what you know now and after what you learned from this experience, if you were given the power to go back in time and magically not have the speech impediment, would you choose to not have the problem and why?” Whoa. 

I have been spending a lot of time in my media production classes trying to teach our students to ask questions that provide better answers from interview subjects for our school television show.  Apparently, some of those lessons are sinking into their process.  Two of the questions brought me to tears in front of the class. Both questions took me back to an exact moment in time that was a mixture of joy and grief simultaneously, and I could not control the tears. Below are those two questions and my responses. 

Question #1: What was it like for you to watch the movie The Kings Speech?

That movie was released and honored with an Academy Award right around the time my stutter started.  I waited a month before I could bring myself to see it, and I watched it in the theater right before I started speech therapy.  I have never related to another movie character more than I did King George VI.  I knew exactly how he felt so many times in the movie.  Knowing I was about to enter speech therapy, the movie gave me a lot of hope.  The scene when his speech therapist, Lionel Logue, has him yell curse words at the top of his lungs was the moment when I laughed and cried at the same time, because I got exactly how freeing that felt.  And, there were multiple times I did that in the privacy of my own home, and it felt amazing to get the words out and have that emotional release.

 

Question #2: How did you feel when you realized the medication was solving your stutter?

There was this moment of extreme joy. (Long pause) Immediately followed by fear and sadness, because now I feared that if the medication worked I might now have Parkinson’s disease at any early age.  And, so far I do not have any other signs of the disease, but that still scares me now. 

Early on, when I was first struggling with my speech and trying to continue to teach my classes and co-lead a church group, a mentor of mine said this to me: “Sometimes the teacher becomes the lesson.” It’s the title of the video with my students within my TEDx talk.  He was encouraging me to be open and honest and share my experiences for others to learn from those experiences in real time.  It was a pivotal and powerful turn for me in how I viewed my circumstances, but I would be lying if I did not admit that on multiple occasions at various points in this process I have wanted to just be the teacher and not the lesson, because it felt too hard, too personal, too exhausting. 

That day last week when I cried in front of my class, I finally became more comfortable with being both the teacher and the lesson whenever it can help others.