Page 258 - The Story of My Lif

which, at Dr.

Bell’s request, she prepared in 1894 for the meeting at Chautauqua of the
American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf. When Dr.
Bell and others tell her, what is certainly true from an impersonal point of view,

that she owes it to the cause of education to write what she knows, she answers
very properly that she owes all her time and all her energies to her pupil.

Although Miss Sullivan is still rather amused than distressed when some one,
even one of her friends, makes mistakes in published articles about her and Miss
Keller, still she sees that Miss Keller’s book should include all the information

that the teacher could at present furnish. So she consented to the publication of
extracts from letters which she wrote during the first year of her work with her
pupil. These letters were written to Mrs. Sophia C. Hopkins, the only person to
whom Miss Sullivan ever wrote freely. Mrs. Hopkins has been a matron at the
Perkins Institution for twenty years, and during the time that Miss Sullivan was a
pupil there she was like a mother to her. In these letters we have an almost
weekly record of Miss Sullivan’s work.

Some of the details she had forgotten, as she grew more and more to generalize.
Many people have thought that any attempt to find the principles in her method
would be nothing but a later theory superimposed on Miss Sullivan’s work. But
it is evident that in these letters she was making a clear analysis of what she was
doing. She was her own critic, and in spite of her later declaration, made with
her modest carelessness, that she followed no particular method, she was very
clearly learning from her task and phrasing at the time principles of education of
unique value not only in the teaching of the deaf but in the teaching of all
children. The extracts from her letters and reports form an important contribution
to pedagogy, and more than justify the opinion of Dr. Daniel C. Gilman, who
wrote in 1893, when he was President of Johns Hopkins University: “I have just
read… your most interesting account of the various steps you have taken in the

education of your wonderful pupil, and I hope you will allow me to express my
admiration for the wisdom that has guided your methods and the affection which
has inspired your labours.”