[Blindmath] college and math

[Rich Caloggero]

>It wouldn't surprise me if there are people who can listen to a reading of 
>a
>complex mathematical text and understand it from the recording, but I 
>strongly
>suspect that those people are in a minority.

Ya, those are the same people who can play a game of chess without reference 
to a board! <smile>

In all seriousness, I think its more than the braille that's important. 
Mathematics is as much about numbers as it is about relationships among 
objects. Especially when learning, it is often advantageous to draw 
pictorial descriptions of the objects and relationships among them.  A 
picture is worth a thousand words, and this is true whether your blind or 
sighted.  Geometry is perhaps the most obvious example here. However, 
applied math / physics would also be very difficult to learn without some 
sort of tactile illustrations / diagrams.

Just my two cents...
-- Rich


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jason White" <jason at jasonjgw.net>
To: <blindmath at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 16, 2009 1:14 AM
Subject: Re: [Blindmath] college and math


Sina Bahram <sbahram at nc.rr.com> wrote:
> I respectfully will disagree with this. I think everyone has unique 
> learning
> styles for sure, but it's sort of equivalent  to saying that sighted
> students can do math without any print available. Sometimes, that's
> absolutely true, to varying extents, but usually, it's far from it.

I concur.
>
> Especially for the fundamentals, I think Braille is essential.

Agreed.

I've heard reliable reports of students' spending a lot of time taking 
braille
notes from audio narrations of mathematics texts, then working from the
braille notes. This adds considerably to a student's workload. The point,
though, is that it's the braille which is used in such cases for learning 
the
material.

It wouldn't surprise me if there are people who can listen to a reading of a
complex mathematical text and understand it from the recording, but I 
strongly
suspect that those people are in a minority.


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