Helen Keller - The Story Of My Life - On Examinations

I read the 'The Story of my life' an autobiography written by Helen Keller* a few days ago.

As I read this book I was amazed not only to see how a blind and deaf person went beyond her disabilities and became one of the most respected and noted thinkers of her times, but also to see how Anne Sullivan, her teacher, taught and channelized her young boundless energy to bring out the beauty in her.

Helen Keller's writings are a pleasure to read, and give us a glimpse of the world that she lives in and experiences. Where at one hand one cant help rejoice in the small victories she experiences in her process of learning, on the other, one can’t fail to notice and enjoy her sense of humour.

The text below is a funny excerpt from her book mentioned above, in which she talks in exasperation about examinations and what she goes through every time she has to give an exam.

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But the examinations are the chief bugbears of my college life. Although I have faced them many times and cast them down and made them bite the dust, yet they rise again and menace me with pale looks, until like Bob Acres I feel my courage oozing out at my finger ends. The days before these ordeals take place are spent in cramming your mind with mystic formulae and indigestible dates--unpalatable diets, until you wish that books and science and you were buried in the depths of the sea.

At last the dreaded hour arrives, and you are a favoured being indeed if you feel prepared, and are able at the right time to call to your standard thoughts that will aid you in that supreme effort. It happens too often that your trumpet call is unheeded. It is most perplexing and exasperating that just at the moment when you need your memory and a nice sense of discrimination, these faculties take to themselves wings and fly away. The facts you have garnered with such infinite trouble invariably fail you at a pinch.

"Give a brief account of Huss and his work." Huss? Who was he and what did he do? The name looks strangely familiar. You ransack your budget of historic facts much as you would hunt for a bit of silk in a rag-bag. You are sure it is somewhere in your mind near the top--you saw it there the other day when you were looking up the beginnings of the Reformation. But where is it now? You fish out all manner of odds and ends of knowledge--revolutions, schisms, massacres, systems of government; but Huss--where is he? You are amazed at all the things you know which are not on the examination paper. In desperation you seize the budget and dump everything out, and there in a corner is your man, serenely brooding on his own private thought, unconscious of the catastrophe which he has brought upon you.

Just then the proctor informs you that the time is up. With a feeling of intense disgust you kick the mass of rubbish into a corner and go home, your head full of revolutionary schemes to abolish the divine right of professors to ask questions without the consent of the questioned.

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*Helen Keller was born in 1880 and at nineteen months lost her sight and hearing owing to an illness. Thereafter she was tutored, guided and taught by a wonderful teacher named Anne Sullivan to read, write and communicate. Helen went on to complete graduation and become an activist and one of the most prominent personalities of the 19th century. She had met all the US presidents of her age, and knew famous personalities like Alexander Graham Bell personally.