NAME : MOLINA, ALESSA AMOR A.

DATE SUBMITTED:APRIL 1, 2023

COURSE AND YEAR: BBSPED 1ST YEAR SUBMITTED TO: DR. LEAH M. SUROT

Reflection Helen Keller

Helen Keller is known the world over as a symbol of courage in the face of
overwhelming odds. Yet she was so much more. A woman of luminous intelligence,
high ambition and great accomplishment, she was driven by her deep compassion
for others to devote her life to helping them overcome significant obstacles to living
healthy and productive lives. Keller has become a worldwide symbol for children to
overcome any obstacle.

On June 27, Helen Keller is born in Tuscumbia, Alabama. A normal infant, she was
stricken with an illness at 19 months, probably scarlet fever. For the next four years,
she lived at home, a mute and unruly child. Following about of illness, Helen loses
her sight and hearing. Special education for the blind and deaf was just beginning at
the time, and it was not until after Helen’s sixth birthday that her parents had her
examined by an eye physician interested in the blind. He referred the Keller’s to
Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone and a pioneer in teaching
speech to the deaf. Bell examined Helen and arranged to have a teacher sent for her
from the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston.Helen’s parents hire Anne
Sullivan, the 20-year-old teacher, was partially blind. A graduate of the Perkins
School for the Blind, to be Helen’s tutor. Anne begins by teaching Helen that objects
have names and that she can use her fingers to spell them. Although she had no
knowledge of written language and only the haziest recollection of spoken language,
Helen learned her first word within days: “water.” Keller later described the
experience: “I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that
was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope,
joy, set it free.”Over time, Helen learns to communicate via sign language, to read
and write in Braille, to touch-lip read, and to speak.

Under Sullivan’s dedicated guidance, Keller learned at a staggering rate. By April, her
vocabulary was growing by more than a dozen words a day, and in May she began to
read and arrange sentences using raised words on cardboard. By the end of the
month, she was reading complete stories. One year later, the seven-year-old Keller
made her first visit to the Perkins Institution, where she learned to read Braille. She
spent several winters there and in 1890 was taught to speak by Sarah Fuller of the
Horace Mann School for the Deaf. Keller learned to imitate the position of Fuller’s
lips and tongue in speech, and how to lip-read by placing her fingers on the lips and
throat of the speaker. In speaking, she usually required an interpreter, such as
Sullivan, who was familiar with her sounds and could translate.When she was 14,
Keller entered the Wright- Humason School for the Deaf in New York City. 1900, she
was accepted into Radcliffe, a prestigious women college in Cambridge with classes
taught by Harvard University faculty. She was a determined and brilliant student,
and while still at Radcliffe her first autobiography, The Story of My Life, was
published serially in The Ladies Home Journal.

Keller became an accomplished writer, publishing, among other books, The World I
Live In (1908), Out of the Dark (1913), My Religion (1927), Helen Keller’s Journal
(1938), and Teacher (1955). In 1913, she began lecturing, with the aid of an
interpreter, primarily on behalf of the American Foundation for the Blind. Helen
Keller was also outspoken in other areas and supported socialism all her life.My life
has been happy because I have had wonderful friends and plenty of interesting work
to do,” Helen Keller once wrote, adding, “I seldom think about my limitations, and
they never make me sad. Perhaps there is just a touch of yearning at times, but it is
vague, like a breeze among flowers. The wind passes, and the flowers are content.”
At 1915 Helen, already a vocal advocate for people with disabilities, co-founds the
American Foundation for Overseas Blind to support World War I veterans blinded in
combat. This organization later becomes Helen Keller Intl and expands its mission to
address the causes and consequences of blindness, malnutrition and poor health. At
1961 Helen suffers a stroke and retires from public life. And on June 1, 1968, Helen
dies peacefully at her home in Connecticut. Her ashes are interred at the National
Cathedral in Washington, DC.

Helen Keller was really a living proof that even if you have disability, that even if you
are poor , if you have a vision if you have a dream you can achieve it all and you can
even surpass it if you believe in yourself and your capabilities and you will not focus
on the hindrances that may stop you from reaching it.