[Blindmath] Struggling Mathematics Student

[Smith, Andrew]

Frankly, I would transfer to another school.  It sounds like your
disabilities office and professors do not care at all (or very
little), and this is unacceptable.

For now, I have some questions for you:
Do you have a textbook?  If so, what is the format, i.e braille, etc?
As far as your dysfunctional TI84, if you have a laptop, I highly
recommend you try Sage (get it from sage math.org).  It can do just
about anything you can think of, and I have found it to be quite
accessible from the command line.

If you have a Learning Ally subscription, I would recommend you just
pick out a College Algebra textbook.  It sounds like odd advice, but
it's what I did for calculus.  The book was inaccessible, the
professor worked with me, but still, the book was inaccessible, and a
math textbook is a math textbook, so I just picked a random book and
learned quite a lot from it.

For this semester, I'd say that, unless you really work your butt off
to pass the rest of the exams, you're probably not going to be very
well.  I'm sorry you've had such a terrible experience, but hopefully
some of this makes sense.

A quick note: Bookshare is absolutely useless in math, from my experience.

On 10/16/14, Clayton Jacobs via Blindmath <blindmath at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> I am a college student currently taking College Algebra With Limits and
> Statistics. In both classes, I am not doing well. In College Algebra With
> Limits, the professor speeds through his lectures, and even though I type
> out the equations he puts on the board, I can't keep up with him. To make
> matters worse, my Orion Ti-84 Plus calculator decided to give on me after
> only having it for 4 months. The note packets are inaccessible, and while
> the disability department at my college is translating the packets, it is
> almost too late in the semester. Additionally, the professor does not
> explain the steps he uses to solve the problems, so my tutor has to do all
> of the work in teaching me. While I have aced my homework, I have failed
> both of my exams so far. The first exam was inaccessible, and the reader
> couldn't even read the exam properly to me to even make sense of it. The
> second exam, which I took yesterday, covered material not even on the review
> sheet. Here was one of the problems verbatim, which I tried my best to
> solve. Factor the expression into a product of linear factors given that 1-i
> is a zero. f(x)=x^4-7x^3+18x^2-26x+12 In Statistics, the professor was great
> in trying to get me accessible notes, but fell short when formulas were
> concerned. I still do not know how to compute the standard error, margin of
> error, confidence intervals, and finding probabilities between z scores or
> areas. I am at a loss of what to do at this point. Trying to explain
> accessibility with formulas has been a nightmare, especially with my College
> Algebra With Limits professor, who has adamantly refused to translate the
> equations into accessible form because that requires too much work for him,
> according to his statement. I had to file a federal complaint against this
> college last year for failing to accommodate, in which a mediation agreement
> was reached. Yet, in many ways, it seems the faculty have treated this as a
> drop in the bucket. I have had such a bad experience with collegiate
> accommodations that I have questioned why I even went back to college in the
> first place.
>  		 	   		
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