How Did She Learn to Read?


For the first time in her life, my 8 yo daughter was fascinated by something taught at school: Helen Keller. That there was a means for the blind to read (Braille) blew her away. An assignment to write 2 pages on Braille helped. She got to see how Braille script looked and that there is Braille script for languages like Hindi too, not just English. (The fact that Braille was originally devised to enable soldiers to read in the dark without turning on candles/lanterns and giving away their positions to the enemy was of interest to me, not so much to her).

But my daughter’s interest wasn’t done yet. A week later, she came and asked me, “How did Helen Keller learn to read?”. Via Braille, remember? “I mean, how did she learn which symbols mapped to a particular letter?” As she moved her hand over the raised symbols of Braille, they must have told which letter those symbols mapped to. Then came her question that knocked me out:
“But she was deaf. So how could they tell her anything?”
Analytical thinking: A+. Interest in this topic: Off the charts.

This blind + deaf combo seemed to be lethal: I couldn’t imagine how Helen learnt to read. So I turned to the oracle Google. Like my daughter’s school book said, her teacher, Anne Sullivan had been the key. Anne bought a doll for Helen:
“By spelling "d-o-l-l" into the child's hand, she hoped to teach her to connect objects with letters. Helen quickly learned to form the letters correctly and in the correct order, but did not know she was spelling a word, or even that words existed. In the days that followed, she learned to spell a great many more words in this uncomprehending way.”
Exactly what my daughter thought.

Since no associations were being made in Helen’s head, she was soon confused between the words, “mug”, “milk”, and “drink”:
“Anne took Helen to the water pump outside and put Helen's hand under the spout. As the cool water gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other hand the word "w-a-t-e-r" first slowly, then rapidly. Suddenly, the signals had meaning in Helen's mind. She knew that "water" meant the wonderful cool substance flowing over her hand.”
And now that the connection was made, Helen extended the principle:
“She stopped and touched the earth and demanded its letter name and by nightfall she had learned 30 words.”

Wow! It was like those experiences of having Feynman explain something in physics. First, the question blows you away. And then the answer, once told, seems so obvious that you wonder why you didn’t think of it yourself.

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