Page 348 - The Story of My Lif

first deaf school Miss Sullivan ever visited, the teacher was busy at the

blackboard telling the children by written words something they did not want to
know, while they were crowding round their visitor with wide-awake curiosity,
showing there were a thousand things they did want to know. Why not, says
Miss Sullivan, make a language lesson out of what they were interested in?

Akin to this idea of talking to the child about what interests him, is the principle

never to silence a child who asks questions, but to answer the questions as truly
as possible; for, says Miss Sullivan, the question is the door to the child’s mind.

Miss Sullivan never needlessly belittled her ideas or expressions to suit the

supposed state of the child’s intelligence. She urged every one to speak to Helen
naturally, to give her full sentences and intelligent ideas, never minding whether
Helen understood or not. Thus Miss Sullivan knew what so many people do not
understand, that after the first rudimentary definitions of HAT, CUP, GO, SIT,
the unit of language, as the child learns it, is the sentence, which is also the unit
of language in our adult experience. We do not take in a sentence word by word,
but as a whole. It is the proposition, something predicated about something, that
conveys an idea. True, single words do suggest and express ideas; the child may
say simply “mamma” when he means “Where is mamma?” but he learns the
expression of the ideas that relate to mamma—he learns language—by hearing
complete sentences. And though Miss Sullivan did not force grammatical
completeness upon the first finger-lispings of her pupil, yet when she herself
repeated Helen’s sentence, “mamma milk,” she filled out the construction,
completed the child’s ellipsis and said, “Mamma will bring Helen some milk.”

Thus Miss Sullivan was working out a natural method, which is so simple, so
lacking in artificial system, that her method seems rather to be a destruction of
method. It is doubtful if we should have heard of Helen Keller if Miss Sullivan
had not been where there were other children. By watching them, she learned to
treat her pupil as nearly as possible like an ordinary child.

The manual alphabet was not the only means of presenting words to Helen
Keller’s fingers. Books supplemented, perhaps equaled in importance the manual