Alan Spent Years Outsmarting His Stutter. Now He’s a Speech Therapist
In fifth grade, Alan Mendoza’s teacher quietly pulled him aside right before recess and told him there was a woman in the library who wanted to talk to him. He walked in, sat down, and she showed him pictures and a passage to read aloud. Alan figured out what was happening fast. He had spent years coming up with his own tricks to get through moments like this, and he used every one of them. When he was done, the woman sent him back to recess and he never saw her again. It was not until years later, after he became a speech pathologist himself, that he realized she had probably been screening him for a fluency disorder all along.
In this episode, Alan, a speech-language pathologist and person who stutters from Long Beach, California, shares what it was like growing up with a stutter that nobody around him really understood. He talks about the strategies he invented on his own as a kid, how a linguistics professor at UCLA pointed him toward speech pathology as a career, and how the pandemic became the moment he finally started accepting his stutter. He also shares what led him to start a stuttering advocacy club at Cal State Los Angeles, what it feels like to work with kids who stutter now that he is a school-based speech pathologist, and why he thinks the most important thing he can teach those kids is how to relax.
In this episode
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