The Story of My Life: With her letters (1887-1901) and a supplementary account of her education, including passages from the reports and letters of her teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, by John Albert MacyKeller, Helen
General
The Story of My Life: With her letters (1887-1901) and a supplementary account of her education, including passages from the reports and letters of her teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, by John Albert Macy
Keller, Helen
Deafblind women -- United States -- Biography; Keller, Helen, 1880-1968
Finding that other people seemed to know so much more about Helen Keller
than she did, Miss Sullivan kept silent and has been silent for ten
years, except for her paper in the first Volta Bureau Souvenir of Helen
Keller and the paper which, at Dr. Bell's request, she prepared in 1894
for the meeting at Chautauqua of the American Association to Promote the
Teaching of Speech to the Deaf. When Dr. Bell and others tell her, what
is certainly true from an impersonal point of view, that she owes it
to the cause of education to write what she knows, she answers very
properly that she owes all her time and all her energies to her pupil.
Although Miss Sullivan is still rather amused than distressed when some
one, even one of her friends, makes mistakes in published articles
about her and Miss Keller, still she sees that Miss Keller's book should
include all the information that the teacher could at present furnish.
So she consented to the publication of extracts from letters which she
wrote during the first year of her work with her pupil. These letters
were written to Mrs. Sophia C. Hopkins, the only person to whom Miss
Sullivan ever wrote freely. Mrs. Hopkins has been a matron at the
Perkins Institution for twenty years, and during the time that Miss
Sullivan was a pupil there she was like a mother to her. In these
letters we have an almost weekly record of Miss Sullivan's work. Some of
the details she had forgotten, as she grew more and more to generalize.
Many people have thought that any attempt to find the principles in
her method would be nothing but a later theory superimposed on Miss
Sullivan's work. But it is evident that in these letters she was making
a clear analysis of what she was doing. She was her own critic, and in
spite of her later declaration, made with her modest carelessness, that
she followed no particular method, she was very clearly learning from
her task and phrasing at the time principles of education of unique
value not only in the teaching of the deaf but in the teaching of all
children. The extracts from her letters and reports form an important
contribution to pedagogy, and more than justify the opinion of Dr.
Daniel C. Gilman, who wrote in 1893, when he was President of Johns
Hopkins University:
"I have just read... your most interesting account of the various steps
you have taken in the education of your wonderful pupil, and I hope you
will allow me to express my admiration for the wisdom that has guided
your methods and the affection which has inspired your labours."
Miss Anne Mansfield Sullivan was born at Springfield, Massachusetts.
Very early in her life she became almost totally blind, and she entered
the Perkins Institution October 7, 1880, when she was fourteen years
old. Later her sight was partially restored.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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