Anne Sullivan
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A Japanese proverb states, "Fall seven times and stand up eight." Despite all the harsh challenges she ran into throughout her lifetime, Anne Sullivan always found ways to get around them or push through them. When she was a child, an illness left her half-blind and visually impaired. Her mother and brother died in her early years and she was left with a destitute life, no education, and an abusive father. ("Anne Sullivan Macy"). She eventually found her way out and went to school, worked hard, and rose up. Anne Sullivan became the dedicated mentor and teacher of a young woman named Helen Keller for the rest of her life. ("Anne Sullivan Macy"). She assisted Keller, who was blind and deaf, to accomplish remarkable and unexpected things. Sullivan's heroic traits and determination to escape from her terrible childhood led her to achieve extraordinary things that no one would have expected from her. Anne Sullivan's resilience, selflessness, and abilities to continue moving forward shone through to exemplify her heroicness.
Resilience was one of the many defining traits of Anne Sullivan. She had a way with bouncing back from hard times in her life an
The Story of my life; with her letters () and a supplementary account of her education, including passages from the reports and letters of her teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan
However, the best part of this book is letters written by Anne Sullivan, starting the day she arrived at Helen's house. In every story I have ever heard about Helen as a young girl, she is always portrayed as a demon child, uncontrollable, full of tantrums, and purely unreachable and uncommunicative until the famous "W-A-T-E-R" moment. However, Anne's letters paint a vastly different picture of Helen. From the very beginning, you can tell that she was a bright, energetic child, with the ability to communicate far more than what I've ever hear
Retrospect
Journal.
Written by Isabelle Shaw
Anne Sullivan is regarded as history’s most inspiring teacher—a ‘miracle worker’—since she devoted most of her life to teaching Helen Keller, who was blind and deaf, to read and converse. Her innovations in teaching blind individuals to communicate using braille and spelling out letters by touching the palm have had a significant impact on modern-day education.
Early Life
Sullivan was born in April in Massachusetts to Irish immigrant parents, who moved to the U.S. during the ‘Great Famine.’ Sullivan herself suffered from impaired vision due to contracting an eye disease, trachoma, when she was a child. This would be important in motivating her resilience to teach Keller later in life. She recognised the importance of education in her early life as a means to escape poverty. Her family fell into great poverty after being abandoned by her abusive father which forced her to move into a Poorhouse: Tewksbury Almshouse. Here she faced tragedy when her brother, her last living relative, died shortly after moving into the Almshouse.
Education
Due to her poverty, at age 14 Sullivan was still illiterate and had never received a
The Story of My Life
Helen Keller's spirit certainly shines in this short but beautifully written memoir, which Helen wrote when she was just 22 (and, worth noting, attending Radcliffe College).
I think most know that Helen lost her sight and hearing at a very young age (she was not yet 2) after suffering a mysterious illness her doctors did not think she would survive. It was not until several years later (almost 7) that her beloved teacher, Miss Sullivan, would arrive and introduce her to the world of language, and thus the world at large.
I found it fascinating to learn of Helen's memories of those many years after she first became blind and deaf, and before she learned language. How does one makes sense of a world she cannot see or hear before she even has words to conceptualize it? It was amazing to me that she was able to understand so much about her surroundings at such a
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