Helen’s statement, “We worked hard and faithfully, yet we did not quite reach our goal” tells us about her failure to achieve the goal at the Wright-Humason School in New York City. What was the goal that she failed to achieve there?

Wright-Humason was a school for the Deaf in New York. Helen had gone there with the highest hopes of learning lip-reading and speech. But things didn’t go as smoothly as Helen or her teachers had thought. Helen’s progress in speech and lip-reading was quite slow. Helen wanted to speak fluently like any other person, but she wasn’t able to accomplish this goal. This disheartened her a lot, but she took respite by thinking that maybe she set too high a goal.

Another major drawback she faced was her habit of guessing. She ran from working through a problem and often got it wrong, especially in arithmetic which she understood only as a puzzle. But despite all these discouraging happenings, she gave her heart into other subjects like Geography. She enjoyed the new experiences of New York, the Central Park and the ever-supporting teachers of the school. Although this phase in her life was a challenging one, she had many beautiful memories and learned many a great lesson.