re: I’m not buying all the Helen Keller stuff

quote:

---

I want you to plug your ears and cover your eyes. Now I want to put your fingers all around your mouth as you say “water”. Feel how your teeth move, how your tongue moves, your lips, the way the form. The vibrations. It’s slow, tedious, unnerving…but when all you have is time, what have you got to lose.

---

Someone is putting their fingers in my mouth, and moving my lips, if I am deaf and blind from birth how am I supposed to know what this means? How did I learn the concepts of language, speech, word meaning without which someone moving my lips around is pretty meaning less. The only analogy I can come up with is you plug up your ears, cover your eyes, and I try to teach you to say a word in Russian when you have no idea what I’m trying to do. Even if I succeed in getting you to make a noise similar to the Russian word, it means nothing to you.

quote:

---

But I think yall are seriously underestimating how difficult it would be to be deaf and blind, and how difficult it would be to communicate with a person who was.

---

Not if you have actually seen The Miracle Worker, which was the movie based on her life. It was obviously very frustrating for all parties involved. Her parents had essentially given up on her until Anne Sullivan showed up.

quote:

---

Blind and deaf, (imagine this for a minute. Close your eyes, cover your ears and try to do literally anything), she apparently graduated with a college degree, wrote 12 books, and founded several organizations

---

It’s pretty astounding if you think about it

How would you know that things have names? That “names” are expressed via word?

Also how do you think? Your inner monologue is in some sort of language.

It’s actually an unfathomable riddle the longer you think about it.

quote:

---

Someone is putting their fingers in my mouth, and moving my lips, if I am deaf and blind from birth how am I supposed to know what this means? How did I learn the concepts of language, speech, word meaning without which someone moving my lips around is pretty meaning less.

---

She was not deaf and blind from birth, she could see and hear until nearly age 2. She could probably recall what some things look like and that we use our mouths to talk. Once she realized that the hand motions and mouth movements were different ways to label things, the floodgates opened for her.

I imagine it would be more difficult to teach someone who was deaf and blind from birth, but it's still possible.

You might first have to teach them that their senses don't work, which can be done by first establishing a touch-based negative/affirmative, differentiating between you and me, and then working through what different body parts can and can't do. From that base, you can work through things like you touch me and I can feel it, I touch you and you can feel it, and so on. Just making the link between your mouth and my ears, and that it doesn't work the other way, would probably be enough to make sense of the mouth movement concept.