It's the birthday of author and educator Helen Keller, born in Tuscumbia, Alabama (1880). She was one of the first people ever to learn to speak, read and write, even though she'd grown up blind and deaf. As a child she often erupted into terrible temper tantrums, but in spite of her disabilities, her parents could tell she was extremely intelligent. So they hired a teacher from the Perkins Institution for children with disabilities. The teacher who eventually came to teach Helen was a woman named Anne Sullivan. The day that Helen Keller met Anne Sullivan for the first time, she knocked out one of Sullivan's front teeth.

But Anne Sullivan stuck with the job. She and Helen moved to an isolated cottage for non-stop teaching sessions. Helen Keller learned to read letters that Anne Sullivan spelled out on her palm, but at first, Helen could only mimic the letters that Sullivan taught her. Then, one day, Anne Sullivan spelled the word "water" on Keller's palm while Keller held her hand in the water from the well. Keller later wrote, "I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten, a thrill of returning thought, and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me."

Within the next few hours, Helen learned thirty new words, and by the end of the month, she'd stopped her temper tantrums. By the time she was twelve, she was reading Milton's Paradise Lost. She went on to college at Radcliffe, where she wrote her autobiography, The Story of My Life, which came out in 1903.

Helen Keller said, "I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble."