Teacher
Anne Sullivan Macy
By: Helen Keller
Year of Publication: 1955
Anne Sullivan Macy
Anne Sullivan Macy was born on April 4, 1866 in Feeding Hills, Massachusetts. Her parents were poor Irish immigrants. Anne had trouble with her eyes her whole life. When Anne was eight years old her mother died and two years later her father left. Anne’s younger sister went to live with relatives and Anne and her younger brother Jimmie were sent to the State Infirmary, the almshouse at Tewksbury. They were sent there because Anne was too blind to be useful and Jimmie was lame with a tubercular hip. Jimmie died a few months later and Anne stayed there for four years.
In October of 1880, when Anne was 14, she went to Perkins Institution and learned to read Braille. While she was there she had an operation on her eyes which allowed her to read normally for a limited amount of time. She stayed at Perkins for six years and graduated valedictorian of her class.
Anne Sullivan Macy arrived in Tuscumbia, Alabama to be Helen Keller’s teacher on March 3, 1887. She began spelling into Helen’s hand and after about a month Helen “made contact with reality”. When Helen was older she went to Radcliffe College. Anne “read” her all the texts that were not available in Braille. This eventually caused Anne to completely lose her sight. A year after Helen graduated from Radcliffe, Anne married John Macy, but their marriage soon broke up because Anne was too dedicated to Helen.
Anne’s vision began to deteriorate to the point that she could no longer be sure where she was going in unfamiliar places. She wasn’t well and they didn’t have a lot of money. In early 1913 they went on the lecture circuit. It didn’t take very long before Anne became very sick and they realized that they couldn’t do it alone. Helen decided to accept a pension that she had previously declined from Andrew Carnegie. When Anne was well they went on the road again, but this time Helen’s mother was with them. After this tour they met Miss Polly Thomson who became their secretary. They continued to lecture until 1916 when Helen became so obsessed by the war in Europe that the only thing she could talk about was peace. Soon after, Anne got very ill with a cough that was misdiagnosed as Tuberculosis. She was rushed off to Lake Placid and then went to Puerto Rico where she got the rest that she needed.
It can be seen, that the language used in To Kill a Mockingbird novel is simple though it deals with critical issues in the society such as racial inequality and rape. Harper Lee bases the story in small town known as Maycomb during Great Depression period. The novel focuses on Jean Finch also known as Scout who lives under the care of her brother Jem and their father Atticus. The children befriends Dill who normally visits his aunt every summer. Scout, Jem and Dill are fascinated and terrified by their neighbor Boo who residents of Maycomb
The story of Anne's childhood must be appreciated in order to understand where her drive, inspiration, and motivation were born. As Anne watches her parents go through the tough times in the South, Anne doesn't understand the reasons as to why their life must this way. In the 1940's, at the time of her youth, Mississippi built on the foundations of segregation. Her mother and father would work out in the fields leaving Anne and her siblings home to raise themselves. Their home consisted of one room and was in no comparison to their white neighbors, bosses. At a very young age Anne began to notice the differences in the ways that they were treated versus ...
Helen Keller has had an influence on society by becoming a role model for the deaf and blind. When she was 19 months she came down with an illness called “scarlet fever”. As a result of the illness, Helen Keller became blind and deaf, leaving her not able to see and hear. Many people didn’t believe in Helen Keller being able to learn, but she ended up proving everyone wrong. Later on in her life with the help of her teacher Anne Sullivan, Helen learned to read, write and speak. Helen Keller once said “While they were saying it couldn’t be done, it was done” (Keller). Helen was born June 27, 1880 from a family of southern landowners with two older sisters in Tuscumbia Alabama. Kate and Arthur Keller found a young woman at the Perkins Institution to teach Helen how to communicate. A month later after Anne Sullivan’s arrival, she had already taught Helen at the age of six the word water and that words have a meaning. Once Helen learned to communicate with others by using ...
On March 3, 1887 Helen met "the Miracle Worker," Anne Mansfield Sullivan. Then, about a month later on April 5, Helen associated the water running over her hand with the letters w-a-t-e r that Anne was spelling into her hand. That day she learned thirty words and proved to be a very intelligent, fast learner from then on. She quickly learned the finger-tip alphabet and shortly thereafter, to write. Helen had mastered Braille and learned how to use a typewriter by the age of 10. When she was 16, she could speak well enough to attend preparatory school and college. In 1904 she graduated from Radcliffe College with Anne Sullivan by her side interpreting lectures and class discussion to her.
Keller's story is also a member of the genre of disability autobiographies in which the writing of one's life story takes on the characteristics of what the philosopher J.L. Austin called "performative" utterances: The primary function of The Story of My Life, in this sense, is to let readers know that its author is capable of telling the story of her life. The point is hardly a trivial one. Helen Keller was dogged nearly all her life by the charge that she was little more than a ventriloquist's dummy--a mouthpiece for Anne Sullivan, or, later, for the original editor of The Story of My Life, the socialist literary critic John Macy, who married Sullivan in 1905. And even for those who know better than to see Helen Keller as disability's Charlie McCarthy, her education and her astonishing facility with languages nevertheless raise troubling and fascinating questions about subjectivity, individuality and language. Roger Shattuck and Dorothy Herrmann's new edition of The Story of My Life--supplemented as it is with Anne Sullivan's narrative, John Macy's accounts of the book and of Keller's life, Keller's letters and Shattuck's afterword--not only restores Keller's original text but highlights questions about originality and texts--questions that defined Keller's relation to language from the age of 12, when she published a story titled "The Frost King."
Helen Keller was born on June 27,1880 in Alabama to Arthur and Kate Keller. Helen Keller was an American author, lecturer and a political activist. At the age of nineteenth months Helen was diagnosed with an illness called "brain fever" leaving her to be deaf and blind for the rest of her life. Growing up Helen gave her parents problems. She was always breaking and running into things so her parents sent her to a school for the blind. In the fall of 1890 she enrolled at Radcliffe College and became the first blind and deaf person to attend a higher level learning institution. After graduating college Helen spent many years traveling the world helping people overseas who were blind. After a series of strokes she retired from traveling in 1961 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom award. On June 1,1968 Helen died in her sleep.
Hetherington, E. Mavis, and Margaret Stanley-Hagan. "The Adjustment of Children with Divorced Parents: A Risk and Resiliency Perspective." Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry & Allied Disciplines 40, no. 1 (January 1999): 129. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed March 8, 2011).
Almost everyone can tell of how Helen Keller learned ways of communication through her aid and teacher, Annie Sullivan, but not many know of her later years, which I have found to be the most interesting. Another is the American Civil Liberties Union, which involves protecting every US citizens rights. Along with these organizations, Keller was a huge part of the woman’s suffrage mo...
When a couple with a child chooses to get a divorce this can have major impact on a child at any age. There are many causes of stress throughout the divorce process that can negatively affect children. First, negative reactions and behaviors are dependent upon the situation before the divorce. Some studies show that how much parents fight, how it is done, how it is resolved, and what precautions are taken to protect the children from it's effects are the most important predictors of child adjustment (Kelly, 2000). Meaning that if children are exposed to fights about custody, money, or the failing marriage they could feel the repercussions of their parents conflict. Next, divorce can cause children to have heightened fear...
Harper Lee, otherwise known as Nelle Harper Lee was born in Alabama, which is also the setting for her novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird". Many of Lee's childhood experiences, influence the basis of this book. "To Kill a Mockingbird" is narrated from the fist person view of a young girl named Scout Finch, as she recants the tale of her family and their experiences during the trial of Tom Robinson, an African-American man who is being charged with rape. This story is centered around the theme of throwing away prejudice not only towards African-Americans, or specific races but towards any people. This theme is directly expressed in the book, when Atticus Finch, Scout's father, tells her and her brother "in order to fully understand someone, you need to climb into his skin and walk around it." This theme of social prejudice is demonstrated in many parts throughout the book such as when Tim Robinson is jailed and later killed without a fair trial because all of the townspeople presumed him guilty due to his ethnicity. Another example of this prejudice and discrimination is shown in the way that Scout Finch views of not only the Finches neighbors Boo Radley, but of other families in the town of Maycomb such as the Ewells and the Cunninghams. The depth of the novel continues to develop as we delve further into the lives of the Finches as a family as well as as Boo Radley and Tok Robinson and all the struggles that they face throughout. It is through this depth, character development, and explosive themes, that Harper Lee was able to make her book, "To Kill a Mockingbird" such an influential novel that not only affected Amer...
Helen Keller was born in Alabama in 1880, and became deaf and then blind following an illness when she was 19 months old. Annie Sullivan came to Alabama to work as Helen's teacher in March, 1887. Scarcely a month later, on April 5, 1887, came the well-known moment at the water-pump, where Helen first associated the objects she experienced with the words being spelled into her hand. Within the next year, Helen began keeping a journal, and was studying the poetry of Longfellow, Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. By the time she was ten years old, Helen Keller was literally world-famous. As early as October, 1888, she was writing letters such as the following one to Michael Anagnos, the director of the Perkins' School for the Blind:
She quickly got the hang of Braille, and she learned to read and write in English, Latin, Greek, French, German, and also Italian. Keller also accomplished the use of the Braille writer and typewriter. Along with Annie Sullivan, Keller went to Boston to learn how to speak. She was taught by Sarah Fuller of the Horace Mann School. Helen made good progress, and at her eleventh lesson, she said “I am not dumb now” (Marlow page 236). From Helen Keller’s childhood, it was clear that she was meant to be an author. Even from a young age, her letters and diary entries were very well-written. They were able to gain high praise from Michael Aganos and Alexander Graham Bell, who viewed the letters as if proof that people who are deaf and blind can be smart(Helen Adams Keller page one). Helen Keller decided that she wanted to go to college, and entered the Radcliffe University in 1900. First, she attended the Cambridge School for Young Ladies in preparation for Radcliffe, which is known today as Harvard University. Radcliffe was the women’s division of the most eminent institution of higher learning in America. The chances of her getting in were slim, and many weren't sure she could do it, but she entered in 1900. Annie Sullivan was always at Helen’s side, so she also went to Radcliffe with Keller. Keller was always able to understand the lectures, as Annie’s fingers translated the lecture so Keller could understand what the lecturer was saying. Helen graduated with honors from Radcliffe University in 1904. Keller had written a book during college called “The Story of My Life,” as one of her professors had suggested she should write a book-length autobiography. Keller took that idea and ran, creating her first book, “The Story of My Life”. In her lifetime, Keller would go on to create fourteen books in all, with John Macy as the editor(Helen Adams Keller pages two and four). Many people thought that
Helen Keller’s life dramatically changed in 1882 when her mother noticed something was wrong with her. What everybody thought was scarlet fever ended up being worse. Helen was blind and deaf. Helen Keller, being both blind and deaf, had many disadvantages compared to people who are not blind and deaf. One of these disadvantages is that she could not attend school. Another disadvantage of Helen being blind and deaf was that she didn’t have many friends, mainly caused by the fact that she could not attend school. At, a young age, Helen realized that she was different from everybody else around her (“The Life of Helen Keller”). She couldn’t talk to anybody, nobody would play with her because of her disability also known as her “sixth sense”.
Helen had an extremely eventful life between her teenage years and her death. She attended Wright-Humason School for the Deaf from 1894 to 1896. In 1898, she entered into the Cambridge School for Young Ladies. In the fall of 1900, she entered Radcliffe. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Radcliffe in 1904. She was the first deaf-blind person to do so. The Story of my Life, Helen's autobiography, was published in 1903. It was translated into fifty languages. Helen wrote ten other books other than The Story of my Life. The Helen Keller archives, which contains all of her works, contains over 475 speeches and essay that she wrote. In 1914, Polly Thomason joined Helen on her journey through life as her secretary. Helen was a member of The Permanent Blind War Relief Fund, which was founded in 1915. She became a member of its first board of directors. Helen was an avid defender of women's suffrage, or their right to vote. She also protested the United State's involvement in World War I. She traveled across the United States, and as a result, rehabilitation centers for the blind were created, education was made easier
As years went on she decided to do something productive with her life. Keller was a woman who made lot’s of achievements in her life with little ability to hear and see. Many thought Keller was the most admired women in America because she did so much with little ability (Feeny “From darkness and silence: The remarkable journey of Helen Keller). On March 3, 1887 she met with Alexander Graham Bell. He was the guy who invented the telephone and also worked with the blind (Feeny “From darkness and silence: The remarkable journey of Helen Keller). On this date she always referred to this “my souls birthday” (Feeny “From darkness and silence: The remarkable journey of Helen Keller). She went to a special school for the deaf as she was growing up (Feeny “From darkness and silence: The rema...