[Blindmath] Math Teaching Techniques

[Jonathan Godfrey]

Hi Arielle et al.,

I've just finished a semester where I taught sections of three different
statistics courses. A first year course with over 350 students studying both
on and off campus, and smaller classes at advanced undergraduate and
postgraduate levels. The way I tackled each class was different because of
the audience I was dealing with. 

My lectures for the first year class were recorded for the use of those
students off campus wich had an impact on the way I delivered those
lectures. Generally, my style is heavily interactive. I might list the
things we want to look for in a histogram and then expect the class to
decide what that means for the data sets provided. Let them be my eyes is a
useful classroom tool. Of course, I already know and can recall from the
notes I keep on hand what I expect to hear. 

The first time a course is run is the hardest. My preparations for the
lectures probably take me twice as long as my sighted colleagues, but the
second time I do almost nothing. For example. Preparing lectures for the
first year class I taught from 2005 to 2011 probably took me 6 or 7 hours of
preparation for every hour of class time. When I delivered those lectures in
2011, I could read the slides for the hour of lectures I would be delivering
at 9 o'clock while I was in the taxi on the way to work at 8:45. (It's a 7
minute drive to work by the way) My point is that any time you spend in
preparing for lectures is not a short term investment. It may take years to
reap the rewards.

There are too many other issues you might want to discuss that I can't
address in a single email message. Do keep asking questions but make it
easier to help by keeping them specific when you can.

Jonathan



 

-----Original Message-----
From: Blindmath [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Arielle
Silverman
Sent: Friday, 9 November 2012 2:43 p.m.
To: Blind Academics Discussion List
Cc: social-sciences-list at nfbnet.org; blindmath
Subject: [Blindmath] Math Teaching Techniques

Hi all,
I was just curious whether any of you have experience teaching quantitative
subjects at the college level (i.e. math, chemistry, statistics etc.) and if
so, could you share a little bit about any alternative methods you use for
teaching sighted students? As a soon-to-be psychology Ph.D. I am qualified
to teach statistics courses, but I've observed that at least at the
introductory level, a lot of the content is traditionally presented in a
very visual way, i.e. with histograms, emphasis on the graphical properties
of probability distributions, etc. I didn't learn that way myself and so I'm
a little lost as to how I would present this kind of material in a way that
is accessible to sighted students. How have you handled these kinds of
issues?
Best,
Arielle

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