[Blindmath] Division of Polynomials

[Susan Jolly]

Hi Sabra and others,

Writing as a sighted person, it is not my experience that all sighted people 
can't think outside the box.  Some of us are, of course, better at it than 
others. I'm sorry that our higher education system is letting blind students 
down. However, I can't tell what is going wrong.  I would hope that all you 
undergraduates can find some graduate students in the math and computer 
science departments who will work with you on a one-for-one basis.

One advantage of working with graduate students is that you may discover 
that some of your professors are well-known for not being able to explain 
things well.  Other professors are unlikely to feel comfortable providing 
you with this information and other students in the same classes you are 
taking may not have enough experience to distinguish between problems that 
are the fault of the teacher or educational materials and problems that are 
their own fault.

Another advantage of working with graduate students is that they are likely 
to understand the subject much better than undergraduates and to have a 
better memory of their own learning experiences than professors.  Lots of 
people enjoy the challenge of making sure that someone else understands what 
they understand.  I wish you success in finding some of them.

I know that looking back on my own experience, sometimes one small 
misconception had a big impact on why it took me so long to understand 
something. Of course I didn't realize I had these misconceptions but I 
probably would have discovered them sooner if I'd been in informal study 
groups where eveyone was asking and answering questions.

By the way I studied math through advanced calculus, differential equations, 
and numerical analysis and had a successful career as a computational 
scientist and I don't remember ever having to do the kind of factoring of 
polynomials that requires spatial methods or synthetic division!

Again my best wishes,
SusanJ

P.S. I've posted this link before but here it is again. The main point is 
that if electronic braille math in the form of computer braille or ASCII 
braille is not backtranslated but simply displayed using a standard print 
font, many sighted people can learn to read it in a few minutes. You might 
want to show this to any sighted people you are working with.
http://www.dotlessbraille.org/readnem.htm