[Blindmath] Looking for a particular type of person to ask questions

Fri Feb 6 02:08:39 UTC 2015

I think Sean's comments here are quite accurate.

I teach sighted students. Too many expect to know the material 100% from attending lectures alone. Those that rely on lecture attendance alone end up getting inferior grades while the students that put the time in after class get the reward such effort brings.

I think that the majority of blind students with sufficient background would understand my lectures as much as any sighted student in the class. Having said that, I don't teach mathematical statistics. I do teach experimental design which can be learned without much matrix algebra but is much easier if the students do understand it. It is considered by most of our students to be the hardest topic in our undergraduate offering. Personally, I don't know why that is because I got a lot out of the lectures I attended on the topic and didn't need to use a lot of energy after class. I now give lectures without notes (or power point slides) so that the students can't ask for them and must read the full study notes where they will get the full set of detail. I give them the high-level view and leave them to it. Some hate it but the ones that get past their previous spoon-fed existence are the ones that turn into our best graduates. I point out the existence of the formulae in the course notes and make them find them so that they all know they exist.

With respect to maths courses, I got the least out of calculus classes and the most from axiomatic geometry where the lecturer took it as a personal challenge to make sure his descriptions were useful to me. He succeeded and even let me deliver one assignment verbally where the rest of the class had to draw a number of graphics with many points and lines. We did this after I explained how hard it had been to teach my father that a triangle could be drawn with two straight lines and a curve if it was to represent hyperbolic space. My father didn't get it so I gave up explaining why I wanted the pictures I wanted. This course in axiomatic geometry was a particular highlight for me. Having failed to find a graduate student who had the time to help me, I asked for a volunteer in the class one day. The student who helped me had until that time never received better than a B. By working with me after class he was forced to deal with the content of the course in a way that obviously made a huge difference for his own learning. He received his first (and probably only) A in his degree.

The ability to get anything useful from attending lectures is why I ended up doing more statistics courses than mathematics ones. I could gain a firm grasp of what was happening and why, without worrying so much about the finer details of problems so much better than was happening in some maths courses. In contrast, my one-to-one tutoring in differential equations led to my best ever exam result The reader/writer for the exam told me afterwards my mark was likely to be 97% if the marker was harsh. Those lectures had proven to be utterly useless to me. The lecturer had the audacity to take some credit for my success but I know full well that the one-to-one assistance was the reason for my success.

The least willing lecturer I ever encountered was for an Economics course. I'm sure that if he'd made the effort to explain some of the IS-LM material better I might have stuck with the subject longer. OK, perhaps not that much longer - I found the other lecturer in that course put me and many others to sleep. In the end, the subjects with the more interesting material and lecturers won out over the boring ones.

I am also quite convinced that some subjects just clicked for me while others were damned hard work. I enjoyed some of them and hated others. 
Jonathan

-----Original Message-----
From: Blindmath [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Sean Whalen via Blindmath
Sent: Friday, 6 February 2015 1:45 p.m.
To: 'Sabra Ewing'; 'Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics'
Subject: Re: [Blindmath] Looking for a particular type of person to ask questions

In my experience, and I think this is broadly true, much of the learning of these concepts comes with practice and discussion outside of class. I view the class as a first pass at the information, but I don't think most sighted students are walking out of the classroom with a 100% grasp on the material.
In various economics and statistics classes that I have taken, when the professor has done well to read the board and describe key graphical concepts, I have left the room understanding the material better than many of the other students in the class. I haven't used tutors, but sitting down with classmates to work through problem sets has been when I really felt that I was gaining a firm handle on the content.

Sean

-----Original Message-----
From: Blindmath [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Sabra Ewing via Blindmath
Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2015 7:40 PM
To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics
Subject: Re: [Blindmath] Looking for a particular type of person to ask questions

When I say benefit fully, I mean you as a blind student got at least what one average cited student would get out of the class. If you were in a higher level math course, for example algebra two and beyond or college algebra and beyond, with other blind students,I would also be curious to know what the format of those classes are and how they work. What do they do instead of just making everybody look at a board because they can't.or if you were a teacher and you would be expected to teach a higher level math course two blind students, how would you do it or how did you do it in the past?I am curious because when I work one-on-one with a tutor, I can learn a lot, but in the class, I can't, and I really want to learn more from being in a classroom setting.I have had teachers verbalize what is on the board and give me problems and graphs to look at in class, but it hasn't helped and I don't know why.I know it is not a problem with my learning because I can learn it if someone teaches it to me outside of class.I want to actually learn from being inside my classroom instead of wishing it would be over and just learning everything outside of class at tutoring. I know this is possible, but I don't know what it would take for it to happen. So I have to figure out what it would take, and then how that could work within the confines of the educational system that my college has.

Sabra Ewing

> On Feb 5, 2015, at 5:26 PM, Sabra Ewing <sabra1023 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I am looking for someone who was successful at learning higher level 
> math
courses in a high school or college settingwith in the confines of the class. If you got tutoring outside of class, that is fine, but I am looking for someone who actually went to a math class and benefited fully from it rather than solely relying on outside help.if you taught a blind student who you felt benefited fully from your class, I am interested in hearing from you as well.I want to know what happened inside the class to make you benefit from it. What strategies did you use as the teacher for the teacher use that you found effective as the student?did the structure of the class change to be more interactive for all of the students? If so, how? Is it possible for a blind student to fully benefit from a math class the way decided student would without changing the inherent structure of the way the school teaches?let's assume a traditional lecture teaching style here.also, what is it about a math class that makes it hard for you to get things from it?apart from verbalizing things on the boardis there anything you ask a teacher to do when you weren't getting something out of a class that was successful?also, could you please provide specific concrete examples rather then abstract statements? Thank you.
> 
> Sabra Ewing

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