Helen Keller
 

Anne Sullivan taught her by writing on her hand.

Helen Kellar was blind and deaf. How do you teach someone blind and deaf the concept of socialism. Or even the word the?

Just a thought, read an article in History class and I began to ponder that question.

I want whatever you've been smoking.


Oddly, those are good questions and I haven't had the right amount of booze to give you good answers.... so, the only answer I can give is:

Anything is possible if you put your mind to it.

Good question but I am left wondering whether you mean how or if she was socialized( as opposed to socialism which is a system of society) or if your talking about definitions.

Draw the word "water" with a wet finger on someone's hand, and if they are quick-witted (as Helen Keller was), then eventually it will click. I understand this is how she got started.

"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing!" - Helen Keller

From the back of my T-shirt.

that is a great quote!

i take it "shit" wasn't part of her vernacular?

I understand the water thing, but how do you explain socialism (form of communism) by writing on her hand?

The same way that you were taught. The only difference is that you "heard" it, while she "felt" it. You were taught a vocabulary, and so was she.

She must have understood it enough for her satisfaction. Helen Keller was a huge supporter of socialism.

To communicate well, does not mean to understand English. Helen Keller understood concepts. She didn't necessarily use the same sentence structure we do.

Just like with children, once the concrete is understood, then ideas can begin to be grasped.

She also did learn to read braille eventually. Reading it in books would have been much easier to understand than the slow laborius spelling in her hand.

I have worked with blind and deaf persons. Was even engaged to a deaf man at one point.

When it comes to abstract concepts or ideas such as socialism they can understand just about as much as you and I do. It's the physical world that they aren't as in touch with. The mental one is completely open to them.

I asked a blind man (who had been blind from birth) who was a friend of mine what it meant to him when someone described things with colors. He said color meant absolutely nothing to him. He pretty much just ignored it when they talked about color. Sure he wished at times that he knew what people were talking about but because he'd never enjoyed the pleasure of seeing color he "didn't know what he was missing".

To me, using sign language can be as expressive as speech. Communication is simply the expression of symbols. The symbols first occur in the mind of the speaker, are translated into words (or in the case of signlanguage symbols again) which are heard or seen by the hearer and interpreted once again into another symbol. If someone says the word "siren" there are so many different "sirens" that people think of that every hearer has a slightly different Picture in their mind.

Being deaf and blind ONLY affects your perception of the physical world. Unless the thing that caused you to be deaf and blind also cause brain damage then you have as much or more of a capacity to understand philosophy and concepts like socialism as much as anyone else.

Oh man, you just opened up a whole SLEW of hilarious and quite offensive jokes.

"Why was Hellen Keller a bad driver?"

"She was a woman!"

No offense ladies :)

Except she did! She became an elegant and inspiring writer. She's one of the most often-quoted women of her time!

I once heard her quoted saying that before she had language she was like an animal. She had no concept of herself, and interacted with her environment only in terms of stimulus and response. Imagine discovering the whole world like that--doing with the world what an infant does, but from inside an adult mind. Just amazing.

Sometimes when I think I've got it rough and don't see a way out, I think about Helen Keller. Sounds corny, but it's true.

So weird. I was just reading Lies My Teacher Taught Me and the first chapter is about the way American History textbooks like to gloss over or omit anything that would cast a negative light on its heroes, like Woodrow Wilson's white supremacy, and Helen Keller's staunch support of socialism. It stemmed from her research on blindness - she discovered that blindness was much more common in the working class because of industrial accidents and syphilitic blindness contracted through prostitution, and this made her sympathetic toward the working person.

The book is absolutely right, although very recently there are trends to question a bit more. I certainly wasn't taught anything about Keller's life except for her learning to write, read, and even speak. Stupid standard curriculum.

I don't want to threadjack, so if anyone wants to talk about this with me, we can start an new thread :)

So strange when the TFP intersects with my personal life.

Ironically, we might have read the same article Sledge. In my Contempory Global Issues class we read an article about Wilson and Keller. Focused on Keller first and how she overcame diversity and how textbooks "lied by omission," by removing this stuff from textbooks because she was a socialist.
Textbooks even ignore the fac that Woodrow Wilson invaded much of South America and vetoed a civil rights bill, and hired whites to replace typically black governmental positions.

The article just tears apart the textbooks that we learned from and how all textbooks want to create a perfect image of U.S. history and deny us of the truth.

Altough you might be reading the actual book Sledge, my teacher photocopied that section from the books, most likely.