When Susan Greenstein Prescott was a high school senior, her English teacher, Fred DeMayo, gave her a terrifying assignment: recite a poem in front of the whole class.
“I had a mild stutter. I’d be trying to get a word out that might begin with [the letter] ‘d’ or a ‘th’ — and the word wouldn’t come out, or I might say ‘the’ three times,” Greenstein Prescott said.
The thought of getting up in front of her peers and stuttering through the poem was too much to bear. Greenstein Prescott went home and revealed how scared she was to her mom, who agreed to write a note asking for her to be excused from doing the assignment in front of the whole class…