[Blindmath] Struggling Mathematics Student

Thu Oct 16 14:24:13 UTC 2014

I have a few suggestions :

1. Leaving the college is perhaps not the best answer and I respectfully ask
those who suggested this course of action to forgive me for suggesting the
contrary. It is far simpler to walk away than to create change.

2.  Sounds like what you are experiencing is similar to something I
experienced when I took my first Math course.  However, I approached it
differently even though it was tough.

3. I was at a University that had never seen a blind student take Math
courses yet I remained hopeful.

4.  I had the same situation with one particular Math professor and I
decided to inform the professor about the importance of accommodation.
Professors may not have time but they need to make time, they are educators
and their job is to educate and some of them confuse issues.  A professor
would sit with another student having troubles but not sit with a blind
student and work on accommodating them, it is a matter of informing that
professor.

5.  Find yourself a champion that can work with you on your courses.  This
is a person that will perhaps dictate the exams with you and have the
patience / expertise needed  to move forward.  You need both a subject
matter expert and a person that understands the patience required to read an
exam for you.  This is your job to create this relationship, no one else
will do it for you.

6.  Recognize that you may have to request an incomplete due , not to your
challenges, but due to the fact that the university is not accommodating
you. 

7.  IT is your job to create a team around you to support your effort.
While some of us may not agree with this approach, it is what worked for me.
I did it this way because educators may not know your needs until you create
that environment of necessity.  Never expect that the educators should know
your issue and address it right away.

8. IF you know the course that you are taking next semester, then you must
work, not the university, on making sure that you communicate that the
materials are needed ahead of time.

9.  Finally, it is simple to look at all the challenges that you are facing.
I completely understand.  I urge you to take your own initiative and follow
up skills to make things happen around you.  Take the ball and go with it
yourself.  For me, it took a few semesters but we had a system that was
better for it.  Champions of change go into an environment and create their
environment, they don't expect the environment to be tailored to their
needs.  You make it happen by building that Alliance  that, eventually,
creates a new unseen alliance which will in turn create results for you.

Dr. Napoleon Hill said that one must build a mastermind alliance around a
cause.  It is your job to build that alliance in a spirit of cooperation.
In the end, everyone benefits and everyone wins but you must be that
champion of change.

Thanks,
Jose Tamayo 

-----Original Message-----
From: Blindmath [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Smith,
Andrew via Blindmath
Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2014 9:59 AM
To: Clayton Jacobs; Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics
Subject: Re: [Blindmath] Struggling Mathematics Student

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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