On the first day of school Lisa Withrow stood before the mirror and combed her hair — the same hair which, years ago, had been plastered with gum and honey at a Girls Scouts camp.
She remembered their taunts — remembered, always, their voices. She remembered the voices of classmates, hissing through halls and slithering between desks.
But on this day she would not be able to escape the voices — least of all, her own. For she would have to speak, and there, in her own speech, lay the serpent of all her fears, coiled around her tongue.
Maria, left, and Lisa Withrow will begin teaching careers after graduating next year.
Her twin sister, Maria, at another mirror, put lipstick on her lips, which could never seem to form the right words in grade school.
She remembered all those years reading in front of her classmates, reading and speaking and hearing what must have been thousands of words — all of them forgotten, except for one, which had wrapped itself around her throat and never let go: “baby.”
That’s what they called her and Lisa. Even one of their speech therapists had warned that they would never get dates in high school talking like babies.
Diagnosed with a speech disability at age 3, the Firestone Park natives had spent their lives being harassed and bullied, struggling to fit in and keep up, wrestling the words of others and choking on their own.
Now, in the fall of 2013, the 23-year-old University of Akron students would be returning to the elementary classroom — but this time, on the day of their first field experience, they would be returning as teachers.
Speech sound disorder
Maria, majoring in early childhood education and intervention, would be teaching children who, like her, had always been different.
She rounded her lips and remembered the countless therapy sessions in front of the mirror, struggling to pronounce, over and over, the letter “r” and other sounds.
The twins have a speech sound disorder, which means they have trouble pronouncing certain sounds and omit, add and jumble syllables.
“Speech sound disorders can be as simple as substituting a ‘w’ for ‘r,’ as in ‘wabbit’ for ‘rabbit,’ or as severe as omitting beginning or ending consonants, making the person unintelligible,” said Pamela Garn-Nunn, professor emeritus of speech-language pathology at UA.
But Lisa and Maria have never been unintelligible to each other. They engage in the phenomenon called “twin speech,” a kind of private language, or “idioglossia,” shared between twins.
“It’s not so much their own language as it is reduced and jumbled up English,” Garn-Nunn said. “Unfortunately, in early childhood this only reinforces their speech habits.”
Yet this twin talk allows the Withrows, if only for a moment, to let go, to forget about their “r’s,” to let their lips relax and the sounds spill out like water.
It is only then that their speech is effortless, like the backstrokes that Maria, a lifeguard instructor at The Natatorium in Cuyahoga Falls, practices in the pool.
Effortless as the brushstrokes that Lisa makes on the canvas, a language of rhythm and color, when all those cacophonous syllables flutter away like the butterflies she paints.
Creating a safe environment for students
Lisa painted on her makeup before the mirror. An aspiring art teacher, she would be teaching students to draw — teaching them that, sometimes, the most eloquent expression is inaudible.
She and Maria, who will graduate with their teaching licenses in 2015, decided in high school, after helping their mother teach at Glover Community Learning Center in Akron, that they wanted to teach, despite their trepidation.
“I like to teach and help people,” Lisa said. “I teach swim lessons, I babysit, I do lots of things with kids … but, still, I had doubts that I would be able to become a school teacher.”
She recalled, with dismay, her first experience teaching a ceramics class a couple years ago for the Akron After School program.
“The fifth graders ate me up and spit me out,” she said. “It was not the easiest thing. I remember getting mad, trying to change the subject, telling them that was not the polite way to act, that this is who I am, and you’re going to have to accept that.”
And something else happened that day.
“One girl in the class had a speech disability and was being made fun of and ganged up on and called a baby,” Lisa said.
Maria remembered a similar incident, while helping in her mother’s class, in which a girl with a reading disability broke down in tears when her peers ridiculed her.
“I had to pull her aside, one-on-one, and convince her she was in a safe place to learn,” she said.
But Maria knew from experience that schools can be far from safe for those who are different, that buildings and rules afford little protection from the cruelties and insensitivities of others.
She knew, also, that teachers can, knowingly or not, exacerbate the problem by putting the student “on the spot.”
“I want to make sure my students feel safe, that they can learn on their own terms, and that they don’t have to be put on the spot,” Maria said. “When they want to speak, or read out loud, I will let them. I absolutely hated when my teachers did Round Robin [a read-aloud activity]. I got so nervous I would shake.”
Meeting the needs of all students
Substituting written assignments for oral ones, and giving more time to prepare for oral presentations, are just some of the accommodations teachers can make for speech-disabled students, she said.
Such modifications and accommodations have been provided for since 1975, according to Timothy Lillie, associate professor of curricular and instructional studies at UA — even if, as Maria said, they were not always put into practice.
Lillie, one of Maria’s former professors, noted that the social model of disability “requires not a cure or erasure of the condition but an accommodation of it.
“It’s important to understand,” he continued, “that a social model does not reject the need for medical care. The goal of health care is to enable people to be part of society as who they are, not subject to the norms of physicians or medical services. In the educational setting, the goal would be to enable the student with a disability to receive the support and accommodations needed to demonstrate what they can do.”
Maria, recalling the one-size-fits-all instruction she sometimes received in the past, commented: “One of the greatest things I learned from Akron is that ‘fair’ does not mean ‘the same.’”
This differentiated instruction is a core tenet of the College of Education’s philosophy of student-centered education, said Denise Stuart, professor of curricular and instructional studies.
“Students come to the classroom with diverse needs, experiences, abilities and ways of learning,” she said. “We must commit to support learning for all students as we develop engaging lessons and curriculum. … Importantly, we differentiate by creating a positive environment that is responsible and respectful of the needs and diversity of our students, where they feel they can learn individually and with others.”
This means meeting the needs of all students — not just those with disabilities, Stuart added.
“One of the things I thought was pretty awesome that I learned in college is that differentiating teaching is not just for students with disabilities; it’s for every student,” Lisa said.
Supportive campus environment
This recognition of the uniqueness of each student encouraged the twins to think of their disability not so much as a deficiency as simply one of the many traits that make them who they are.
“It just means I’m different, and I don’t think there’s anything that I need to be sorry about for that,” Maria said.
Moreover, their treatment on campus has given them little reason to be ashamed, they added.
“No one has ever made fun of the way we talk here. No one. Ever,” Lisa said.
In the absence of the old insinuating voices, they began to hear, in the welcome silence, their own voices with a newfound clarity and acceptance.
“Sometimes people would ask me for directions, and think I had an accent, and ask where I was from,” Maria added. “I’d say, ‘No, I’m from Akron, it’s a disability,’ and they’d immediately apologize and get embarrassed. I’d tell them, ‘No, you don’t have to get embarrassed, it’s not something I’m ashamed of anymore.’”
“I don’t want anyone to pity me,” Lisa said. “This is just me, it’s who I am, it’s how I talk.”
Elizabeth Emerson, 22, a graduate student at Kent State University who resides with Lisa in Stow, said she met the twins in education classes at UA and “was just so impressed by how open and calm and confident they were,” adding that she “never heard or felt even hidden teasing.”
“I can imagine, in college, kids not directly teasing them but talking behind their backs,” she said. “But there was nothing — no snickering or whispering or anything.”
Ready to speak
Maria, putting the final touches on her makeup, knew that the classrooms she would enter might not be devoid of snickering and whispering — either about herself or the other students like her, students whom she is committed to help.
“I understand where they’re [children with disabilities] are coming from,” she said. “I’m not just observing them; I’m reliving what I went through. I feel like I can help these children who have disabilities, who are different, who learn differently. I can help them learn the way they need to learn.”
Providing that help also means, she added, trying to replicate in the classroom an environment similar to that on campus — an environment of openness, respect and sensitivity to students’ myriad differences.
“You have to own who you are,” Lisa said.
“I don’t think it’s bad to change yourself, as long as you’re not losing yourself,” Maria said.
She and Lisa took one last look at themselves in the mirror.
In the silence they heard the voices, not of their childhood bullies and tormenters, but those which were welling within themselves.
The pain had uncoiled from their throats, letting loose its grip — and on their lips there perched, like softly landing butterflies, the syllables of their story.
They were ready to speak.
Story by Nicholas Nussen