January 25th, 2022

Post date: February 7, 2022

We had a great meeting on Tuesday.  Six of us showed up in the Zoom: Chris M, Natalie, Andy, Jeff, Martha, and me.  The time seemed to fly by as we were so engaged in several discussion topics.  Martha is looking forward to helping a 17yo high school senior, her first teen client, and had recently had the opportunity to talk about stuttering on a podcast out of Newfoundland/Labrador.  So cool!  This then led to a long conversation about stuttering and everyone got to "pick the brains" of the two SLPs in attendance about theories of causes, different "types" of stuttering, the effects of meds/drugs, etc.  She shared a paper describing how even when stutterers are "fluent" their speech motor patterns/movements have been shown to be "irregular" and not the same as "normal speakers" (I can't find this paper I downloaded, so please email Martha if you'd like to see a copy!).  Chris has discovered an Italian stuttering FB group with which he is looking forward to more engagement and challenge with the Italian language.  We asked Andy how his first big Toastmasters Speech went and although he didn't win (rats!!), he knew it went well for him.  He received suggestions to slow his rate and so this led to this topic... about just how hard it is to put in those pauses and be "ok with silence".  I remembered an "old NSA" meeting program called "Speaking Circles".  Does any "oldtimer" reading this remember that.  If you wanted a turn, you had to stand up in front of the group and be silent, observing the group members, and getting comfortable with the silence before beginning to speak.  I remember doing this activity in some of the meetings way back when we met in the upstairs room at Dysart's!  Very hard to do!  So that was it basically.  We missed those who weren't there and hope to see more of you in February!   And in fact, remembering this activity raised my interest so I decided to research it and I found a lot more about it, both related to NSA and also the general program, which I see was actually adapted/modified by NSA to use as a meeting activity.    Here is the the Wikipedia link if anyone is interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaking_Circles

Stay safe this weekend.  It looks like we'll be getting a snow-bomb here on the coast!