Helen Keller - Miracle Worker
Helen Keller was born a precocious child. She suffered a severe fever at 19 months that left her deaf and blind. With only a few simple signs to communicate, the little girl became uncontrollable. Her mother had read with great hope Charles Dickens 'American Notes’, which described Samuel Gridley Howe’s work with his deaf blind student Laura Bridgeman at Perkins School for the Blind. The Kellers wrote to the school and Michael Anagnos, the schools second director recommended class 1886 valedictorian Annie Sullivan as Keller’s governess and teacher. Annie Sullivan’s pay was room and board, with $25 per month.
Annie Sullivan’s life story and achievements are inseparable from Helen Keller’s and are equally remarkable. Annie was the orphaned daughter of Irish famine refugees. She had spent her childhood in a squalid poorhouse in Tewksbury Massachusetts with her brother, who had died there. Untreated trachoma had left her nearly blind. At age 14 she cried out to Frank Sanborn while he was investigating the poorhouse. He was a Massachusetts Board of Charities investigator who was also a trustee of the Perkins school. Soon after she was enrolled at Perkins. She was very unhappy at first. Some teachers even resisted working with the uncouth, illiterate and tempestuous teenager. At least once she was threatened with expulsion because she did not fit in with her more cultured peers. Annie Sullivan became close to one Laura Bridgeman, who was then in her 50’s and mastered spelling into her hand with the manual alphabet. When she had graduated form school Annie Sullivan was very worried that she would be unable to find useful work and was therefore very grateful for the opportunity to teach.
She now spent several months reading Samuel Gridley Howe’s descriptions of his work with deaf blind students. At the age of 21 she instinctively developed her own methods of teaching. Firstly, she separated Helen Keller from her overprotective parents by moving with her to a cottage on the Keller farm and instituted firm discipline. Rather than using prepared labels as Howe had, she finger spelled into Helen Keller’s hand from the start. She constantly named whatever drew the little girl’s attention, just as one would with a preverbal hearing child, trusting that Helen would learn through repitition and context. The natural world became their private classroom. Her techniques are still fundamental in deaf blind education.
After 5 weeks with Annie Sullivan Helen Keller connected the sensation of water running over one hand with w-a-t-e-r spelled into the other. Suddenly Helen understood that everything had a name and that there was a system of language she could use to communicate. This was the breakthrough that became immortalized in the 1957 play ‘ THE MIRACLE WORKER’. Yet Helen Keller had no memory of that day any more than toddlers remember their first words. She reserved the word ‘miracle’ for a second breakthrough: the day she realised on her first visit to Perkins School for the Blind, that she could communicate with her peers. ‘What a joy to talk with other children in my own language!’ she wrote in her autobiography. ‘Until then I had been like a foreigner speaking through an interpreter. In the school where Laura Bridgeman was taught I was in my own country.’
Michael Anagnos invited Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan to stay indefinitely at the school, where both thrived. Perkins’s teachers gave lessons in basketry, clay modelling, Greek, Latin and French, which Helen mastered in quite a few months. Annie Sullivan always had final authority over Helen Keller’s education. Helen Keller’s world expanded at breakneck speed and she became a figure of world renown.
Acknowledgement: Perkins school for the Blind. By Kimberley French – The Campus History Series.
We at the Anne Sullivan Foundation are proud to commemorate the name of Anne Sullivan, the orphaned daughter of Irish immigrants from Limerick, Ireland, as our tribute to this unsung heroine.
