Quarter 3

The activity that I will be doing this quarter 3 reflection on for science is going to be the Friendship Walk and Helen Keller. The friendship walk was an activity that we did in class that provided us with an insight on what being blind and having no eye sight would be like. We would partner up and one of the pair would put on blindfolds that would cover there eyes, the other person would help guide the blindfolded person outside the classroom without touching them. After completing this, they then would switch roles and do the same thing, only they would go back inside the classroom. Helen Keller is a girl that, when she was young, had a strange fever that had left her blind and deaf. When she lost these two key senses she started to wonder why she was different because when she would feel her parents' faces, they would be vibrating. Soon a teacher of hers taught her many things that soon made her succeed in life.

I think that the purpose of the friendship walk was for us to develop a new understanding on what it would be like to be unable to see. This not only provided us with a new understanding, but it also provided us with a real "hands-on" experience on what its really like to be blind like that. The purpose of learning about Helen Keller is, I think, to understand more about her life and what she and her amazing teacher, Anne Sullivan who has guided her through her life, teaching her how to spell, read and write brail, resulting in Helen getting honors.

I have learned many things from these two activities. From the friendship walk I have learned that your eye sight is one of the greatest and most useful organs in your body. I learned this because when I had my blindfolds on, I felt like I was in an endless void. I didn't what were going on around me and I didn't know what was around me. I had no way of knowing whether there's a wall in front of me or when its just open road. The only thing that I had to guide me, was my partner's voice. Only without my eye sight I had felt like I was lost and alone in this vast world, now I wonder what it would have been like for Helen Keller when she not only lost her eye sight, but she also lost her ability to hear. When Helen Keller came down with the fever that had soon changed her whole life, she had no idea about what being able to see or hear was like because she was very young. However, she still had a hard time during her early life because her parents would be talking while she would be feeling there neck to get an idea of what they look like, but when she feels these strange new vibrations, she starts to realize that she is different from all the others. Sometimes this would lead her to her screaming and shouting while the parents just didn't know what to do or how to go about doing it. When Anne Sullivan, her teacher, finally came to the rescue of the parents, she started to hold objects in one hand and spell the letters out for her in the other hand. After a long time, Helen started to realize that the words that were being spelled in one hand meant the object in her other and so she started to learn the names of all the objects, people and everything from then on. Using that method, she went to high school and also graduated college with honors. She learned to read and write brail, which is like the writing language for the blind, and Helen wrote many books on being blind and deaf.

There is not much that I could have changed differently in my learning about Helen Keller, since we had learned from the book and had not yet seen the movie, but there is one little thing that I could have changed during the friendship walk. I could have talked more clearly when I was guiding my partner outside of the classroom because he was getting agitated about not hearing my voice when I was telling him if there was anything in front of him. At first I didn't realize how this would agitate him but then when it was my turn to become blind, I started to not hear him because of the noise around us as other partners did the same thing. This really worried me because I had felt lost in an endless void with no return at that point.

My goal in science this year is to enhance my understanding of science. These two activities have helped my so much in getting closer to achieving this goal since they have provided me with a "hands-on" experience as I have said before. This helped to learn better what it is like to be blind. Also, I understood a little better how the mind works without the use of eye sight and the emotions that you start to feel which has helped me greatly when it came to relating my experiences to what happened to Helen Keller.