Helen Adams Keller大学演讲PPT.pptVIP

Helen Adams Keller Introduction June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968 She an American author, political activist, and lecturer. She was the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.The story of how Kellers teacher, Anne Sullivan, broke through the isolation imposed by a near complete lack of language, allowing the girl to blossom as she learned to communicate, has become widely known through the dramatic depictions of the play and film The Miracle Worker. A prolific author, Keller was well-traveled, and was outspoken in her opposition to war. A member of the Socialist Party of America and the Wobblies, she campaigned for womens suffrage, workers rights, and socialism, as well as many other leftist causes. Early childhood and illness Helen Keller was not born blind and deaf; it was not until she was 19 months old that she contracted an illness described by doctors as an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain, which might have been scarlet fever or meningitis. The illness did not last for a particularly long time, but it left her deaf and blind. At that time, she was able to communicate somewhat with Martha Washington, the six-year-old daughter of the family cook, who understood her signs; by the age of seven, she had over 60 home signs to communicate with her family. Early childhood and illness Anne Sullivan arrived at Kellers house in March 1887, and immediately began to teach Helen to communicate by spelling words into her hand, beginning with d-o-l-l for the doll that she had brought Keller as a present. Keller was frustrated, at first, because she did not understand that every object had a word uniquely identifying it. In fact, when Sullivan was trying to teach Keller the word for mug, Keller became so frustrated she broke the doll. Kellers big breakthrough in communication came the next month, when she realized that the motions her teacher was making on the palm of her hand, while running cool water over her other hand, symbolized the idea of