[BlindMath] Any ideas on how to fund this?

[Ray McAllister]

Hi, how are you?  I'm just wondering if anyone out there knows how a totally
blind person like myself might fund this life path change listed below.

 

 

     This tells how after earning a Ph.D. in religion, I'm now exploring
mathematics. 

 

     I lost my eyesight at 12 years old, and while I loved mathematics as a
teen-ager, I knew that math, at the college level and beyond, wouldn't be
accessible for a blind person, then, in the 1990s.  I felt called to study
theology, and earned a Master of Divinity degree in 1999 and then when that
didn't produce any ministry jobs, I started a journey toward a Ph.D. in
religion, Hebrew Bible, which I graduated with in 2010.  While I did some
teaching as a student, and taught some online afterward, I was never able to
find full-time employment.  I also never really felt academically satisfied.
The only thing I published after my PhD., academically, was my dissertation,
and that didn't require much work.  

 

     In 2021 and 2022 my time in teaching online ended, and I was unable to
find anything else.  Being Seventh-day Adventist, most institutions outside
my denomination didn't want me, and I wasn't able to demonstrate what
schools within my denomination wanted.  I went on sSDI, Disability.  As I
was unable to find much work in ministry while in school, I had to keep
taking out student loans for living expenses.  Once on Disability, I got
those loans forgiven.  This means, though, that I am not allowed to take out
any more federal student loans, which I was almost maxed out on anyway. 

 

     I now believe that there was one and only one main reason for me to do
that Ph.D.: my work in setting up more than 40,000 pages of Biblical
language documents in Braille formats for the blind.  My winning, with a
small team of scholars, of the 2016 first prize Jacob Bolotin Award, from
the National Federation of the Blind confirms that this could be reason
enough for my journey in religion.  Now that that task is done, a task,
quite mathematical, actually, I am free to explore what I wish. 

 

     In the last few months, I've been exploring math more.  I was good at
math even as a small child.  I won math competitions in high school and
learned whatever I could as an adult, even without taking math classes.  I
did computer graphics, for fun, in the 2010s, and most of that was
mathematically-driven, since I could not see.  In fact, really, my first
love was math, not theology.  

 

     Just a few months ago, my mathematical journey took a most interesting
turn.  I found a group of mathematicians that needed me to help beta test a
blind-friendly version of a pre-calculus book.  I know just enough math to
understand the material, but not so much that I can't learn from it.  I'm
really loving the studies and am often figuring out, in my head, concepts in
actual calculus that I'd be studying in that class eventually.  Nowadays,
screenreaders, such as mine, will read equations and let me browse and tour
them to understand how they look.  I can write simple computer programs to
help me with other difficult visual aspects of math.  

 

     I'm also tutoring a young lady in math, in a class where I often have
to go onto Google to learn her material beforehand so I can teach her, but
she is succeeding, and I am learning the material alongside her.  I am also
greatly enjoying this, and her family is even paying me some to do this.  

 

     There may be a future for me in math.  Since I'm on Disability, I have
time to study.  I have the mental energy, even, to go for another Ph.D.  I
could even enjoy doing some publishing in math, and I love teaching.  The
only issue is funding.  I'm not eligible for loans, and I wouldn't want them
anyway.  I'd need to find grants, maybe grants for the disabled, the blind,
STEM (science/technology/engineering/math) grants, or other ways of funding
my journey.  I did have scholarships that helped much through college as my
high school GPA was quite high.  I'm open to all ideas and prayers
concerning this matter. 

 

 

Thanks, 

Ray. 

 

 

 



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