Helen T Keller, a blind and deaf, was a terror, wily and mean. Helen was also animal like. Nevertheless, her teacher Anne Sullivan who transformed her lived the philosophy: "learning is all about instilling confidence of the student in his or her own abilities" !
Sullivan pioneered the teaching of individuals without sight and without hearing. Today we speak of deaf culture, but this term was not used in the era of Anne Sullivan. "Teacher" as Helen always called her, is credited with making it possible to reach students who were thought to have mental retardation.
The daughter of Irish immigrants, Sullivan was born in Feeding Hills, Massachusetts, on April 14, 1866 and entered the almshouse at eight when her mother died and her father abandoned her and her brother. Half-blind herself, she went to the Perkins School for the blind in Boston at age fourteen without a toothbrush, hat or coat. Her only possessions were a shirt and stockings tied in a bundle.
At age twenty one, Sullivan took a job offered by the Keller family in Tuscumbia, Alabama to teach the Keller's daughter, Helen. Helen Keller was an angry and frustrated child, but she was not stupid. Sullivan quickly realised this fact and began her assault on Helen's locked mind. Within a month she made contact with Helen in the the now-famous pump story, immortalised in the drama The Miracle Worker. Sullivan finger spelled words into Helen's hand with each word suiting an action. Finally, Helen, feeling water over hand, realised the connection between word and object. She had broken the code and realised that everything had a name.
Sullivan's methods were practical. She taught Helen to play through games and exercises stimulating her to ask the names of the motions. She kept a menagerie of animals for Helen to help her understand movement. She progressed to abstractions like peace and God as soon as Helen was prepared to grasp it. Sullivan wanted to make Helen as normal as possible, giving her every experience she could. She worked at reaching her to sit, stand and walk properly. As soon as Helen could distinguish between right and wrong, Teacher sent her to bed for misdeeds. Laziness, carelessness, untidiness and procrastination were dealt with by ingenuity, humour and light sarcasm, and not judged by the marks and remarks.
Helen used the manual alphabet for three years before she began to speak. When Helen was nine, Sullivan was rewarded with the words "I am not dumb now". It was one of the most dramatic achievements in the history of teaching. Sullivan's great discovery was that a child should not be taught each word separately by a separate definition but instead should be given endless repetition of language he or she does not understand all day long. Sullivan continually spelled words into Helen's hand to mimic the way a hearing child in the cradle absorbs words. The method had never before been put into practice in the education of a deaf child, especially a deaf-blind one.
When Helen attended a school for deaf in New York, Anne Sullivan went along. At Cambridge School and Radcliffe College, Sullivan attended classes, interpreting instruction and looking up words for Helen. She made herself into Helen's eyes and ears and supplied knowledge to a starving mind as she fired her drive to study hard and answer her questions. Because awakening happens not in the length of our answers but in the depth of our questions through reflective thinking. After college, Sullivan also accompanied Helen on worldwide lecture tours as Helen became a famous author and personality.
Extraordinarily close, here the teacher and student spent much of their lives together to realise that sight is a function of the retina of the eye while insight is a function of a refined mind. And that the role of a teacher is not to teach, but to make students realise their ignorance and instil confidence in his or her own abilities. The name "Teacher" has thus been enriched by Anne Sullivan's dedicated life, persistent high standards and creative instruction.
© RISHIKESH KB
Redrafted and posted by the author on 04-09-2015 celebrated as Teachers Day.
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