[Blindmath] Struggling Mathematics Student

[Sarah Jevnikar]

Hi Clayton,
I've been thinking about your predicament and wanted to chime in. you've had
some good suggestions already, but I thought I'd throw my 2 cents in. I'm a
current college student too, having taken both calculus and probability
courses. I'll comment on each concern raised in sequence.

"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."
It's hard when you're trying to get equations down, but raise your hand and
ask him to repeat what he's just said. This isn't a blindness issue
necessarily, it's a teaching issue. I'll bet there are 10 other students
who'd like him to slow down but feel too scared to ask. Be that person.
Everyone will benefit, especially yourself. If you don't get what's going
on, it's your right and your job to figure out how to receive that
information in a way you can understand. Can you record lectures? Try that;
for past lectures, see if another student (my school has a means to email
all one's classmates in a given course) has done so. Many students do,
whether or not they have the accommodation to.

"The note packets are inaccessible..."
What format are they in? What format would you prefer? Ask the professor how
they make them. If they're in LaTeX or Math Type/equation editor, ask for
the original copies. There are ways of translating these into Nemeth code or
other accessible formats. If you don't have the right software, I'd be happy
to translate them for you. It takes seconds a file. In many mainstream
environments, you have to ask for exactly what you want in order to make
progress.

"and while the disability department at my college is translating the
packets, it is almost too late in the semester."
Ask them for reader support to get you the material. See if a fellow student
would be willing to read them to you. Suggest the incentive of better grades
for them (they may not actually take the time to read it themselves and
would probably benefit) or buy them coffee. See if you can get insight into
the disability department's translation process. Can they send you bits of
the packets rather than the whole thing all at once? Are there faster ways
of translating?

" 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."
This isn't a blindness issue per se, but an issue of a poor teacher. Does
your instructor have office hours? It's well within your rights to say "sir,
I didn't follow your method for example 3 in lecture today. Could you please
break it down for me, or suggest other things I might do to follow it
better?" Don't be afraid to ask for clarification in class. Again, you're
not the only one who'd benefit. Having sight doesn't give your peers some
magical understanding of math. 

"While I have aced my homework, I have failed both of my exams so far."
What about your assignments makes them "aceable"? How have you done so well?
The answers to these will help you petition your instructor. Again, at an
office hour, it's well within your rights to say "I'm doing really well in
my assignments because I [insert reason]. Can we come up with a plan
together to try to bring those same successes to my exams as well?"

" The first exam was inaccessible, and the reader couldn't even read the
exam properly to me to even make sense of it."
Hang on ... and you still wrote the exam? Why? In such a circumstance you
have the right, and the obligation to refuse to write it until you and your
reader can make sense of it. If it's a case of a reader being unfamiliar
with a certain subject area, you need to demand a reader who is familiar
with that subject. It's also much easier to get a problem solved if you
refuse to write an exam, rather than writing it and then raising concerns.
The latter gives the false impression that you're dodging the blame for a
poor mark. Obviously you're not, but a perception may exist. At this point,
all you can do is work with your disability department to have it in your
official accommodations that someone familiar with math must be your reader
for future tests. I might be wrong about this, so follow up.

" The second exam, which I took yesterday, covered material not even on the
review sheet."
As others have said, this is not an accommodation issue. However, it is your
right, as any student has, to ask the instructor for clarification. "I
noticed that some topics on the exam weren't covered on the review sheet. In
future, how can I better prepare for an exam?" How much is each exam worth?
Can you petition for reweighting so that more emphasis is placed on the
final, by which time you'll be better prepared? Or, as others have
suggested, perhaps withdrawing or getting an incomplete would be a good
idea. It's not that you can't take these courses, but you and the school
have to be prepared.

"In Statistics, the professor was great in trying to get me accessible
notes, but fell short when formulas were concerned."
Again, what do you mean by "accessible" in this case? And at the risk of
sounding crass, given that formulae are the most important part of math in
many circumstances, the ball was dropped almost completely. If the
instructor was willing to go so far for these notes, asking him/her to go a
bit further won't hurt. Again, see how they make their notes. Ask them to
read them to you, or find a graduate student or your tutor to help. Keep
lines of communication open so that you can be immediately aware if things
aren't going to plan. Ideally this should start when classes do, but the
semester isn't over yet, so capitalize on the time you have left.

" 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."
Simply ask. "I know it's late in the term but I don't know how to do these
calculations and I need to learn them." Do you have the same tutor? Get them
to help. Go to instructor office hours. Demand your education, but do so in
a way that gives concrete methods: "you need to read this to me" or "I need
this in Braille/Math Type/Lean math/LaTeX". People can hear the broad term
of "accessibility" and freak out. Break it down for them so they don't have
the excuse to say that you didn't make yourself clear. YouTube and iTunesU
are great resources. So is Wikipedia. Form a study group with peers. These
calculations are not terrible if memory serves, so it won't take long for
you to get the hang of them.

" 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."
What have you asked for? Have you been specific? If so, and he's still
refusing you, go to your accessibility department. Their job is to go to bat
for you when professors refuse accommodations. If he won't listen to you,
you might have better luck with them. You talk about a statement; have you
spoken to him in person? It's often harder for people to blow you off if
they have to look you in the face while doing it. Keep your cool, ask for
what you need, and be willing to (assertively rather than  aggressively)
defend your reasoning and your rights to equal access. Be willing to make
concessions only if you can live with the outcomes.

I realize this is tough: you've come off of two bad tests and have too
unreasonably difficult courses. But you still have to be your own advocate
in many ways and be specific about what you need and how you intend to get
it. College is an awesome and valuable experience; if nothing else, you'll
come out of it a more self-aware and self-advocating individual.

Keep us posted on your progress. We're here to support you in any way we
can.

Sarah


-----Original Message-----
From: Blindmath [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Sabra
Ewing via Blindmath
Sent: October-16-14 8:31 PM
To: kperry at blinksoft.com; Blind Math list for those interested in
mathematics
Cc: Clayton Jacobs
Subject: Re: [Blindmath] Struggling Mathematics Student

For now, you could try using XL, and also some websites have online
calculators that will help with specific functions if you just Google
it.also, look online for a Z score table.there are also some websites where
you can type in your value and get the corresponding z score.your teacher
can also make tactile graphs very easily in just a few seconds by putting a
piece of paper on top of a piece of vinyl and drawing on it. You can
actually feel it really well, andyou don't have to pay a lot of money for
one of those expensive drawing boards with the expense of paper.as for
handouts and things that your teacher gives you,if the handouts are in
digital format, but the only problem is the equations, you can either have
your teacher or a math professor who works alongside your teacher redo the
equations for you.it actually doesn't take very long because they are just
redoing the equations, not the whole handout.if the handout is only printed,
you could still OCR it,and the profess!
 or you're working with could just go through and check for errors and also
fix the equations so the work isn't so hard.as for the book, that's a harder
one.Learning Ally has math books, but they are in audio format.The problem
would be getting an up-to-date addition in time because it's too late to
request it now.another problem is that especially for the higher-level math
courses, doing math using audio is so hard that it's almost not even worth
it.Book share has math books, and in my experience, they have tried it to
include the equations, but the formatting is so weird that I can't read or
make sense of them very well.because the equations are the most important
part, that book no longer helps me. It will be even worse if you try to get
the PDF from the publisher.if you can find an earlier addition in an
accessible format, you could see if your professor will let you do your
homework out of that one.I would say the main thing is to work on getting
your homework  an and a!
 ccessible format.I have found that for the explanations of how to do i t,
textbooks can oftentimes not be the best options.it's true that the people
who write them use a lot of examples, but they aren't very clear about what
they're doing. They just put numbers down and expect people to understand
where they come from.they also sometimes don't get to the point very well,
and they fail to connect graphical concepts with algebraic concepts, which
especially for a blind person can be confusing.if you want the explanation
from your textbook, you can try using an earlier addition, or if there is a
lot of text and not as much equations, you might have better luck listening
to that using audio if it's available.another thing you can do is go to the
Internet and just Google what you want to figure out how to do.for example,
you could Google how to put a quadratic equation into vertex form,and you
would get lots of articles that would tell you how. It's true that some of
them won't have accessible equations, but a lot of them actually will.some
equation!
 s will be written in such a way so that on either side of the formula,
there is this weird text, but you can just ignore that part and just read
the formula.also, I'm sure that some of the people on this list can give you
the formulas you need in an accessible format.you could also get a peer
tutor. That would be a really good thing becauseThe tutor will have a more
flexible schedule then the teacher and will be able to provide you some and
devoted one on one time that the teacher might not.I think it would be best
to work directly with the professors and your math department on the
formatting of documents and exams and things like that becauseyou really
need to actually no math to make sure it's done correctly.for example, if
someone is converting an equation for you that includes a fraction written
in a spatial format that sighted people enjoy,they need to know where to put
parentheses and things like that when they're converting it to a linear
format so they will do it w!
 ithout changing the meaning of the equation.some graphs are also not v ery
helpful in a tactile format, so the person you are working with will need to
know how to describe graphs in a way that you can understand, but where you
can actually do the problem.for your statistics class, I think you should
definitely get a tactile version of the normal model distribution that isn't
skewed, but is skewed to the left, and that is skewed to the right.it's also
helpful if you can get these formulas converted into a list of steps you can
follow because sometimes they don't really make sense and formula form.and
if using a calculator or another tool turns out to be more trouble than it's
worth, you can look into doing some of these things by hand.for the graphs,
it really helps me to start out learning how to do it algebraically,and then
relate what I learned about the data to how it would be presented on a
physical graph and how it might change under certain conditions.when I'm
doing transformations for example, I'm not thinking of a graph. I'm thinking
o!
 f My equation in and how it will change because that's the most important.
When I get the equation I Think about how that would translate into a graph
if necessary.I also like audio graphs because I can hear the whole graph
and make sure I don't miss anything. Also, I seem to remember them better
for some reason, whereas I can't remember anything about a tactile graph
once it goes away.there is this free program called math tracks where you
can take your equation, put it in there, and it makes an audio graph. I
alsolook for three-dimensional objects wherever possible. I remember the
lessons I had involving three-dimensional objects a lot better than anything
involving just a boring picture.



> On Oct 16, 2014, at 12:06 PM, Ken Perry via Blindmath
<blindmath at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> 
> We would like to have you call our customer service here at APH and 
> get that Calculator fixed.  What do you mean it gave out on you.  
> Please email me directly kperry at aph.org.  I am the project leader on 
> that calculator and am very interested in why it would not be working.
> 
> Ken
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Blindmath [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of 
> Clayton Jacobs via Blindmath
> Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2014 9:26 AM
> To: blindmath at nfbnet.org
> Subject: [Blindmath] Struggling Mathematics Student
> 
> 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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