Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Biographies Hellen Keller Hellen Keller Helen Keller was born on 27 June 1880 in Alabama. Her father was a newspaper editor. She was a lively and healthy child with a friendly personality. She could walk and even say a few simple words. In 1882 she caught a fever that was so bad she almost died. When it was over she could no longer see or hear. Because she could not hear it was also very hard to speak. She was 18 months old when this happened. But Helen was not someone who gave up easily. Soon she began to explore the world by using her other senses. She followed her mother wherever she went, hanging onto her skirts. She touched and smelled everything she came across and felt other people's hands to see what they were doing. She copied their actions and could do some jobs herself, like milking the cows or kneading dough. She even learnt to recognise people by feeling their faces or their clothes. She could also tell where she was in the garden by the smell of the different plants and the feel of the ground under her feet. By the time she was seven she had invented over 60 different signs she could use to talk to her family. If she wanted bread for example she would pretend to cut a loaf and butter the slices. If she wanted ice cream she wrapped her arms around herself and pretended to shiver. At the age of five Helen began to realise she was different from other people. She noticed that her family did not use signs like she did but talked with their mouths. Sometimes she stood between two people and touched their lips. She could not understand what they said and she could not make any understandable sounds herself. She wanted to talk but no matter how she tried she could not make herself understood. This made her so angry that she used to throw herself around the room, kicking and screaming in frustration. The older she got the more frustrated she got and her rages got worse and worse. She became wild and hard to control. If she didn't get what she wanted she would throw tantrums until her family gave in. Her favourite tricks were grabbing other people's food from their plates and throwing breakable things on the floor. Once she even managed to lock her mother into the pantry. Eventually her family knew that something had to be done. So just before her seventh birthday the family hired a private tutor. Anne Sullivan had a very sad life and she was poor. She had lost her own sight when she was five and had been thrown into the poor house when her family broke up. Finally she was lucky enough to get a place at the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston. She had the nickname 'Spitfire' because she was so rude and had such bad behaviour. But the director realised that if she could learn to behave she would be one of his most talented students. After several years, and two successful operations to restore her sight, she graduated with honours. The director knew that this was the person to tame Helen Keller. Anne soon realised why Helen threw tantrums. She knew that if she could teach her to communicate she would be a different person. But before she could teach this wild child, she had to control her. When she tried to get Helen to do something she didn't like Helen would scream and kick and bite. Anne eventually won these battles by will-power and not giving up. Anne decided to teach Helen the manual alphabet. This is a sign language where each letter is signed onto the hand of the deaf-blind person so they can feel it. Each letter has a separate sign. This means that words and sentences can be spelt. It also means that hard ideas can be expressed. Anne led Helen to the water-pump and pumped water onto her hand. At the same time she spelt out the individual letters, W A T E R. She did this again and again. Suddenly Helen realised that the individual signs stood for the letters that made up the word Water. In the same instant she also realised that everything else in the world must have a name. She rushed around touching anything she could find and asking Anne what it was called. Anne kept teaching Helen this way for the next few years. She talked to her about all the things that were happening around them. She spelt everything into her hand using complete sentences instead of single words. That way Helen got a lot of information in the same way that a hearing child does. By doing this, Anne was giving her student the words and the ideas she would need when she was ready to talk. Anne was careful to teach Helen about the subjects she was interested in. The two of them would wander through the fields discussing whatever ideas came into Helen's mind. This way Anne managed to keep Helen interested in a lot of different subjects. It also meant that they could have some fun hobbies like sailing and tobogganing. Helen became gentler and she learnt to read and write in braille. She also learnt to read people's lips by pressing her fingertips against them and feeling the movement and vibrations. This method is called Tadoma and it is a skill that very, very few people manage to get. She also learnt to speak, a major achievement for someone who could not hear at all. In 1888 they both went to the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston. Here Anne continued to teach Helen but with the equipment and books provided by the school. Then in 1894 they went to the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York. Anne attended the lessons with Helen and acted as her interpreter. She tapped out what the teachers said into Helen's hand and transcribed all of the books into braille. Helen turned out to be a very good scholar, graduating with honours from Radcliffe College in 1904. She had great concentration and memory and determination to succeed. While she was still at college she wrote 'The Story of My Life'. This was an immediate success and earned her enough money to buy her own house. Helen was very religious and her faith led her to examine the world more and more carefully. She began to see that there was great injustice in the world and that people were not treated equally. Blindness was often caused by disease which was often caused by poverty. She became a suffragette and a socialist and demanded equal rights for women and better pay for working class people. She also helped set up the American Foundation for the Blind in order to provide better services to people with impaired vision. She toured the country, giving a lot of lectures. Lots of books were written about her and some plays and films were made about her life. Eventually she became so famous that she was invited to Europe and received many honours from foreign universities and monarchs. In 1932 she became a vice-president of the Royal National Institute for the Blind in the United Kingdom. After her death in 1968 an organisation was set up in her name to fight blindness in the developing world. Today that agency, Helen Keller International, is one of the biggest organisations working with blind people overseas. Without the help of others Helen Keller would never have succeeded the way she did. She relied a lot on Anne Sullivan, who went everywhere with her for almost fifty years. But Helen Keller was very remarkable. She was very intelligent, sensitive and determined. She was the first deaf-blind person to make such a public success of her life. But she is not the only person with a hearing and sight impairment to succeed. She is only the best known. Maybe her biggest success was in convincing other people that disability is not the end of the world. One Japanese lady said about her, 'For many generations, more than we can count, we bowed our heads and submitted to blindness and beggary. This blind and deaf woman lifts her head high and teaches us to win our way by work and laughter. She brings light and hope to the heart'. I liked learning about Helen Keller because she worked hard and learned how to do things that most people thought blind and deaf people could not ever do. She found other ways to learn than the way most people do because she was handicapped, but she did not let it stop her. Bibliography: Word Count: 1461
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