WRITER AND ADVOCATE UNITED STATESI long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.
—HELEN KELLER
Six-year-old Helen stood near the water pump and held one hand under a stream of rushing water. With her other hand, she felt the movements of her teacher’s hand as Anne used sign language to spell out w-a-t-e-r. Blind and deaf, Helen had spent most of her childhood unable to communicate with anyone around her. Because she could not hear, she had forgotten that objects had names; she had forgotten the concept of language. But now, here at the water pump, it was all coming back to her. She finally understood! This coldness that she washed her hands in every day was water. What are the names for everything else? she wondered excitedly. What is my name?
With Anne’s help, Helen took her first step toward learning to communicate. Eventually, Anne would help Helen overcome her disabilities, teaching her to read, write, and even speak. Helen’s triumph changed attitudes toward disability; she taught the world that people with disabilities may face unique challenges, but can make extraordinary contributions to society.
The most difficult subject for Helen was math, but she loved to read and write—and her autobiography was published when she was just 22!
Helen Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama. She was a bright child who could walk and speak a few words before her first birthday. But tragedy struck when Helen became ill at nineteen months. This illness left her blind and deaf, and for the next five years, Helen lived in a dark, silent world. Like any other little girl, she had toys and liked to play. She especially liked dolls, and her favorite was one she named Nancy. But Helen had a fitful temper, and she sometimes beat her beloved doll only to hug it lovingly a few minutes later.
Such behavior worried Helen’s parents, but they had no way to communicate with their child. They taught her a few easy signs, like nodding her head yes and shaking it no and pretending to cut a piece of bread to show that she was hungry. She could also perform some everyday tasks like folding and putting away clothes. But the Kellers worried that their daughter would never learn the difference between right and wrong and that they would never be able to tame her violent temper.
When Helen was six years old, the Kellers hired Anne Sullivan as her teacher. Anne, herself, was barely twenty years old when she arrived, and she had overcome her own difficulties. As a fourteen-year-old orphan, she entered the Perkins Institute for the Blind. Anne was legally blind and could not read, but she learned quickly at the school. A series of operations almost fully restored her eyesight, but her personal experience with blindness motivated her to help other blind children.
Now Anne faced the difficult task of teaching Helen. For the first couple of weeks, she gave Helen objects and then spelled their names into her hands. But Helen didn’t associate the objects with the words until the day at the water pump. From that day forward, Helen made rapid progress. By the end of the summer, she had learned 625 words. Over the next few years, she learned to read braille, to write, to type, and even to speak. At this time, the education of people with disabilities was very controversial. Most people thought that it was not possible or worthwhile to educate disabled people, but Helen and Anne proved how ridiculous this idea was. Helen attended regular schools and devoured literature, math, history, and foreign languages. Against all the odds, twenty-year-old Helen was accepted into prestigious Radcliffe College in 1900. Anne attended classes with her, signing the lectures into her hand. Four years later, Helen graduated at the very top of her class.
Helen devoted the rest of her life to writing and advocating the rights of the blind. Her first book, The Story of My Life, was published in 1903 and became a bestseller that has been translated into more than fifty languages. Soon afterward, Helen and Anne embarked on a lecturing tour of the United States and Europe. Helen spoke out for women’s rights and international peace. Her most important work, however, was with the American Foundation for the Blind. Helen called for better education and employment for blind people, and through her celebrity she made the public aware of the changes that were necessary. For her courageous work, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.
Helen attributed her success to her devoted teacher, Anne. In The Story of My Life, Helen wrote:
The most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, came to me. I am filled with wonder when I consider the immeasurable contrasts between the two lives which it connects. . . . On the afternoon of that eventful day, I stood on the porch, dumb, expectant. I guessed vaguely from my mother’s signs and from the hurrying to and fro in the house that something unusual was about to happen, so I went to the door and waited on the steps. . . . I felt approaching footsteps. I stretched out my hand as I supposed to my mother. Some one took it, and I was caught up and held close in the arms of her who had come to reveal all things to me, and, more than all things else, to love me.12
Helen and Anne had a close friendship and worked together until Anne’s death in 1936. Together, they broke down barriers of education and discrimination, forever changing the way the world thinks of people with disabilities.
HOW WILL YOU ROCK THE WORLD?
I’m going to rock the world by opening a school that teaches teenagers how to care for children with special needs. My classes will increase teenagers’ self-confidence and respect for all disabled people, while making it easier for parents of disabled children to find qualified sitters.
DEVORAH FRADKIN 
AGE 14