Quote of the Day (Annie Sullivan, on ‘Beginning and Failing’)

“No matter what happens, keep on beginning and failing. Each time you fail, start all over again, and you will grow stronger until you find that you have accomplished a purpose—not the one you began with, perhaps, but one that you will be glad to remember.”—Irish-American teacher and disabilities advocate Annie Sullivan (1866-1936), quoted by student Helen Keller, Teacher: Anne Sullivan Macy (1955)

Quote of the Day (Annie Sullivan, on Beginning and Failing)

“Keep on beginning and failing. Each time you fail, start all over again, and you will grow stronger until you have accomplished a purpose— not the one you began with perhaps, but one you'll be glad to remember.”— Irish-American teacher of the blind Annie Sullivan (1866-1936), quoted by student Helen Keller in Teacher: Anne Sullivan Macy (1955)

Quote of the Day (Bruce Lowry, on the Sacrifices and Impact of Teachers)

“[M]ost of us have no idea of the sacrifice teachers make, or the challenges, big and small, they face, or the difference that they make, today, tomorrow, and perhaps years from now, on their students’ lives.”— Bruce Lowry, “Let Us Pause to Pay Tribute to Our Teachers,” The Bergen Record, May 20, 2018

Attached is a photo of one of the most famous—and dramatic—teacher-student stories in history: Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan, the relationship immortalized in the play and movie The Miracle Worker. 

But each one of us has had at least one teacher who has affected us for the rest of our lives. The luckiest of us will have a good deal more.

Today wouldn’t be a bad day to say "Thank you" to them. In fact, any day of the year would do.

 

Photo Discovery of Helen and Teacher

Take a close look at this photo and its subjects: the little girl with the doll, and a young woman. Their high-necked, ruffled clothing indicates that this probably comes from the late 19th century, which, without something else intrinsically interesting, would make this picture only of antiquarian rather than historical interest. Sure, you’d expect this from the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston, which turned up this gem and announced it last week.

But examine this more closely as you take an imaginative leap across more than a century. The woman – judging from the unlined face and trim body, probably no older than her early 20s—gazes slightly away from the camera—you can’t tell if she’s looking directly at her charge or at another point off in the distance. Or maybe her eyes are bothered by the camera flash so much that involuntarily, she’s forced to look away.

And yet, despite everything, she keeps those eyes open, the way a realist does—the way you would, too, if you had endured the loss of a mother to tuberculosis, abandonment by an abusive, alcoholic father, or one painful eye operation after another.

With her simple white dress with the brooch at the neck, she appears indistinguishable from hundreds of thousands of other young women of Irish descent. Who’d ever think that the actress who achieved immortality as sexy Mrs. Robinson would win an Academy Award for playing her?

Those pensive eyes maybe ponder the secrets of the child, thinking that taking her outside on a day like today, where she can soak up the atmosphere and play with others her age, might help.

The firm lips hint not just at the sense of resolution that any adult needs in dealing with a youngster, but also the iron will not to yield in the face of difficulties that would daunt anyone—particularly outbursts so prolonged and terrible that as a last resort to putting this girl away, her parents have written in desperation from all the way down in Alabama up to Boston, pleading for someone knowledgeable enough to break through to their daughter.

And there is the young girl, sitting straight up in her high-backed porch chair, far more inscrutable than her teacher because she’s turned sideways, not focused on anything at all—and, with her eyes almost closed, perhaps completely unable to do so. But even at the age of seven, in profile, she’s already showing signs of the beauty she could become as an adult—a beauty she might never be able to appreciate—and of dimensions so profound that Mark Twain would call her 10 years later “the most marvelous person of her sex that has existed on this earth since Joan of Arc.”

Above all she’s comforted, maybe even transported, to a realm only she, sightless and deaf as she is, can comprehend, as she cradles a doll with far more ornamentation in its dress than either the adult or the child. How did she get this doll? From her parents? Or maybe from this young woman, as a kind of welcoming gift, an expression of openness to someone who doesn’t invite it?

Did you notice the hands clasped together? They reveal much, too—of a bond forming between teacher and child, of care and concern, of ways of communicating beyond simply the fingerspelling in the palm that forms part of the sign language the girl might have to master to break out of her isolation.

By now, you can see that this picture doesn’t spill its secrets about time, place or even people. They have to be teased out as you imagine these two and their world, of what it must have taken to cross this threshold into something they could never anticipate—public astonishment in their time and even ours, and emotional complications in the journey of two people who achieved so much.

Well, you can read about them, not just in the news articles explaining this photo discovery, such as this one, but in substantial biographies like Joseph P. Lash’s Helen and Teacher. Then you can enter more fully—emotionally this time—into this picture of Helen Keller and her redoubtable teacher, Annie Sullivan, the “Miracle Worker” who proved how much of a difference one human being—a teacher, maybe even you—can make to others.