I was very shocked last week about just how little we know about Helen Keller. For us to know more about Kim Kardashian’s failed marriage than Helen Keller is a true tragedy. Interested to see what I missed out on, I decided to do some research on her life and report back.
Even though, as discussed in class, we know plenty of her childhood and not enough about her adult life I think it is necessary to start off by saying she was not born blind and deaf but rather after a fever at 19 months old, lost both those senses.
In children’s books I believe they stress that Helen Keller’s main form of communication was writing in the palms of hands yet she actually mainly communicated (and started doing this almost immediately with Anne Sullivan) by placing her hand on people’s lips and throat to feel the vibrations and the movement of the lips that helped determine what sounds and words that were being made. Here is a YouTube clip.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv1uLfF35Uw
Immediately after graduation from college she immersed herself in helping mankind, not just the impoverished and blind, but the groups fighting for human rights. She wrote and gave speeches, joined political parties and Unions in order to fight for a better life for all. She met every U.S. president from Grover Cleveland to Lyndon Johnson, this demonstrates just how active she was in political matters.
She wrote many articles, journals, essays, and her own books. She published fourteen books! She also founded the Helen Keller International foundation in 1915 that is dedicated to preventing blindness and reducing malnutrition worldwide, its still active to this day. As we can see, Helen Keller was active in all aspects of life and the world being vocal about her opinions and was one who was all talk and all action. This is a great site for kids to explore where it is nicely organized into different segments of Keller’s life.
http://www.afb.org/braillebug/hkmuseum.asp
It is our job as teachers to supplement the readings and work in the classroom. If we do not think the books, curriculum, and activities are adequate, it is up to us to do more research and prepare our students. I thought it was important to explore Helen Keller’s life not just to be more enlightened on the subject but because I know that we as teachers will have to do this plenty of times in our classrooms about many other people, subjects, and world events.
I agree that I think educators do their students a disservice when they do not provide the entire story. When we learned about how much of Keller's life is left out of the stories we hear, I was appalled. I also felt cheated by all of my teachers in the past who did not share what was missing. Helen Keller was so much more than a child who defied challenges. While this is an admirable quality and a message that every student could stand to learn, it does them no favors to stop there. Not only is it the job of the educators to supply the full story, but also to be a trusted bank of knowledge. When I learned how much my teachers left out about Keller, it made me wonder what else I only got half the story of. It is not a good feeling to question an education you thought was pretty solid, and as educators it is our job to make children feel secure in what they have learned and to prepare for to enter the world with a full arsenal of information. This may require stepping outside the box, and providing information that goes off the beaten path.
ReplyDeleteI agree that our students are suffering from a great disservice for only hearing about the early part of Helen Keller's life, and not knowing all of the work that she did for social justice issues. But I do not blame teachers entirely for my previous lack of knowledge. There has been a long history of lack of knowledge surrounding her life. How can we blame teachers for not teaching students more about Helen's life when these teachers grew up with the same type of books that our students read. Teachers need to start questioning their own knowledge and the books that they provide for their students. This is an example of why we need to question, most of us, prior to reading this article, would never have dreamed of questioning the story about Helen Keller that we all learned.
ReplyDeleteI, like most of the class, was surprised to hear about all the accomplishments of Helen Keller and what she did with her life past the age of seven which she seems to be frozen at by the media. I feel our teachers should have done more to expose us to the whole story of Helen Keller, not just the first seven years of her life up until the water pump event. Just because the rest of her life might not have been as climactic, does not mean you can sum it up in one sentence at the end of the story. I think it’s a teacher’s duty to the students to put forth a valiant effort to provide us with all the information. After reading the full story of Helen Keller and realizing what I missed out on, I will use this as a learning experience for when I become a teacher.
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