Anne Sullivan: The Miracle Worker
By February 22, 2022
Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller shared the most famous student-teacher relationship of all time, dramatized in countless plays and films, but how much do you really know about this innovative educator? Just what made her such a miracle worker?
Anne Sullivan
Sullivan's parents, Thomas and Alice, fled their native Ireland during the Great Famine and settled near Boston, where Anne was born in 1866. Eight years later, Alice died and Thomas feared he couldn't care for his children alone, so he sent Anne and her little brother, Jimmie, to live at the Tewksbury Almshouse. The hundreds of people who crammed into the unsanitary poorhouse meant waves of disease, causing little Jimmie's death just three months after he and his sister arrived.
When Sullivan was five, she contracted a bacterial eye disease called trachoma, leading to severe vision loss and little hope for an education. She had heard of schools for blind students, however, so when state authorities inspected Tewksbury in 1880, she worked up the courage to ask them to send her to one. To her surprise, they agreed.
The Perkins School
When Sullivan began studying at the Perkins School for the Blind, she couldn't even write her own name, frustrating some of her teachers, who were accustomed to instructing the privileged daughters of wealthy families. Others, however, recognized her intelligence and determination, and with their help, Anne thrived. She also received surgery that improved her vision enough that she could see the words in a book, so that helped, too. Within two years, she had caught up to everyone else in the school.
Sullivan soon befriended Laura Bridgman, an older resident of the school and its first blind and deaf pupil. Bridgman used the manual alphabet, which she taught to Sullivan, who spent endless hours reading the newspaper to Bridgman and discussing current events. Her work with Bridgman was actually what led her to the Keller family. Captain Keller had read about Bridgman and wrote to the director of Perkins, Michael Anagnos, requesting a teacher to work with his blind and deaf daughter in their home in Alabama. Naturally, Anagnos recommended his most recent valedictorian, and on March 3, 1887, Sullivan began teaching Helen Keller.
