Helen Keller - Part I

May 17, 2010

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If you think it's too hard to pursue a &#&High School's&#& career. If you are alone thinking about your life and the difficulties you have to overcome, if you have economic inconveniences and they are as a big wall in front of you, ok I understand your point, but perhaps things are not as bad as they seem to be.

Let's share this woman's story, just to remember how astonishing life can be.

To start let's know something about hearing impairment, and visual loss. A hearing impairment or hearing loss is a full or partial decrease in the ability to detect or understand sounds, and this term is usually reserved for people who have relative insensitivity to sound in the speech frequencies. Vision loss or visual loss is the absence of vision where it existed before.

How cruel can it be for a 19 months year's old girl to become deaf? And besides blind?

She must have been isolated. The truth is that normally any form of communication between people is a two way street.

On 27 June 1880 in Tuscumbia a small town in Alabama, Northwest of the United States, Captain Arthur Henley Keller and Kate Adams Keller had their healthy daughter named Helen Adams Keller, she was born with her normal five senses.

Before Helen learned to speak, the illness that struck her, and left her deaf and blind, was diagnosed as brain fever at that time; perhaps it was scarlet fever. As Helen Keller grew from infancy into childhood she was a wild girl and she couldn't follow any rule. Actually she had little real understanding of the world around her.

On a March day in 1887, when Helen was a few months short of seven year's old, Anne Mansfield Sullivan came to Tuscumbia to be her teacher. Miss Keller was always to call that day "The most important day I can remember in my life." Miss Sullivan was a 20-year's old young lady.

Anne Sullivan had been a blind girl who had regained useful sight through a series of operations. She was a graduate of the Perkins School for the Blind. This school had been founded in Boston in 1829 being the first school of its kind in the United States. Perkins School pioneered &#&special education&#& for people who are deaf blind when seven-year-old Laura Bridgman became the first deaf blind person to learn language, in 1837.

Fifty years later Annie Sullivan used the same methods of &#&special education &#&she was educated with to teach Helen Keller.