Question

Biography sketch of hellen keller

Answer 1

"The most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, came to me. I am filled with wonder when I consider the immeasurable contrast between the two lives which it connects."
- Helen Keller

Helen Adams Keller was born June 27, 1880, in the northwest Alabama city of Tuscumbia. Her father was a retired Confederate Army captain and editor of the local newspaper; her mother was an educated young woman from Memphis. When Keller was 19 months old, she was afflicted by an unknown illness, possibly scarlet fever or meningitis, which left her deaf and blind.

Keller was extremely intelligent and tried to understand her surroundings through touch, smell and taste. However, she began to realize that her family members spoke to one another with their mouths instead of using signs as she did. Feeling their moving lips, she flew into a rage when she was unable to join in the conversation. By the age of six, Keller later wrote in her autobiography, “the need of some means of communication became so urgent that these outbursts occurred daily, sometimes hourly.”

The birthday of her soul

Anne Sullivan came to Tuscumbia to be Helen’s teacher on March 3, 1887. Later Keller would call this day her "soul's birthday." Perkins Director Michael Anagnos had been wise to choose the strong-willed Sullivan, for few young women would have persevered through the tempestuous first weeks of the relationship. Keller hit, pinched and kicked her teacher and knocked out one of her teeth. Sullivan finally gained control by moving with the girl into a small cottage on the Kellers’ property. Through patience and firm consistency, she finally won the child’s heart and trust, a necessary step before Keller's education could proceed.

Sullivan started with the techniques developed by Perkins' first director, Samuel Gridley Howe, when he worked with Laura Bridgman 50 years earlier. She fingerspelled the names of familiar objects into her student’s hand. She also innovated by incorporating Keller’s favorite activities and her love of the natural world into the lessons. Keller enjoyed this “finger play,” but she didn't understand until the famous moment when Sullivan spelled “w-a-t-e-r” while pumping water over her hand. Keller later wrote: