A student’s lesson from stuttering
High school student E’dan Carson says his stuttering taught him to never give up.
E’dan Carson is a bear-sized 17-yearold whose hair rises geyser-like in a ponytail centered at the top of his head.
He has a voice to match his mass: A contrabass that rumbles up and out, big but also somehow soft, like the boom of distant thunder.
It’s a voice well-suited to the career E’dan intends to pursue: sports announcer.
But had you met E’dan a decade ago, you might have considered such a goal to be heartbreakingly quixotic. E’dan is a stutterer.
As a boy, his attempts at speech hopelessly sputtered and stalled.
“’Iiiiiii. Iiiiiii.’ That’s how it started with me,” he said.
E’dan is sitting at a table in the Washington High School library. He dwarfs the table as well as the woman seated beside him, his speech pathologist, Cindy Dean.
“I could barely say a couple of words without stuttering 20 times. I sounded like a scratched CD.”
He was laughed at and teased, he said. And the taunts only intensified when E’dan, this stammering kid who could barely spit out his name, went out for sports.
“People be telling me like, ‘You’re garbage,’” he said.
E’dan went out for football. He didn’t just go out for football. He went out to master football. There were things he had control over and things he didn’t. One thing he had control over was his effort. He had control over how hard he could try.
And, E’dan knew, he had the capacity
to try very, very hard.
“I always had confidence in myself,” he said.
“I know I’m going to be able to do this. And I don’t care how long it takes. I am going to be able to do this.”
Now in his junior year and a member of the varsity team, E’dan has missed but two practices — once because he broke a finger, once to attend a funeral.
He’s tenacious, which you see for yourself on highlight videos posted on the website Hudl, where he describes himself this way: I will complete any task given to me. I never give up on anything. Stuttering, for instance. E’dan is a stutterer, but you probably would never have guessed. Only a trained ear might notice that he keeps what he says under control. He approaches his stutter with a discipline that is simply stated:
“I’m going to do what I have to do to fix it.”
Dean shakes her head. In her 26 years as a speech pathologist, she said, she has never met a stutterer like E’dan.
“I don’t think you get that this is hard,” she tells him.
“People can’t do this. People aren’t like you. What you are doing, actually doing, is really hard, so hard that people give up all the time. You never give up.”
Toward the end of last semester, Cindy asked E’dan if he would speak in front of a group of 145 speech pathologists working in Milwaukee Public Schools.
“Someone asked him if he would ever see himself as a nonstutterer,” Cindy said.
“He said, ‘Why would I do that? That’s part of who I am. I’ve worked my whole life on my speech, so why would I ever say I don’t have a speech problem?’ “
Someone else asked what has and hasn’t helped him.
“Nothing hasn’t helped me,” E’dan said. “It has all helped me.”