[nabs-l] Kerri and Calculus

[Chelsea Cook]

Hi Kerri,

  I am Chelsea Cook.  Welcome to the NFB! You will find many 
great people here.
  I agree with what everyone is saying about E-mailing 
accommodations.  I'm a senior in high school, and for the past 
two years, my teachers have been awesome on E-mail.  Some have 
given me PowerPoint, others Word.  I use JAWS, and am not a fan 
of PDF, but that's me.  There is a way to convert PowerPoint to 
Word though (assuming no graphics are involved.)

1.  Open the PowerPoint.
2.  Press F6 until you hear JAWS say, "Outline view."
3.  Select all, copy and paste into Word.

  This procedure has gotten me far.
  With biology: It's not my favorite science (I hope to major in 
physics), but when I took it, I found a way to do the Punnent 
Squares mathematically.  (If math's not your thing, that's okay, 
but it's just what helped me because I didn't get it visually.) 
You can take each trait and FOIL (first, outer, inner, last), 
like you would do with any polynomial in Algebra.  Just multiply 
and distribute all the traits in the square, and your first and 
last or "squared" terms will be dominant.  The middle could go 
either way.  This works for a square with any grid size; for the 
bigger ones, you just may have to spend some more time 
multiplying it out, but that's just what got me through.  I'm a 
math person.
  Speaking of math (to all on list): I'm in AP.  Calculus this 
year and it is not going well.  My teacher rarely gives feedback 
and never stays after school, so when I have a question, I 
oftentimes can't ask it or get the detail I need to finish a 
problem.  It almost seems like she doesn't want to work with me 
(whether because I'm blind or just take too much time in her 
opinion, I can't tell).  Other students don't really understand 
the material enough to explain, and I don't know many people in 
the class.  What do you do when this comes up in college? The 
class moves very fast, and I want to be able to learn calculus (I 
know I can), but something just isn't clicking now.  Any advice? 
No one around here seems to want to know it for the math; they 
just seem to want credit for the course.

Thanks,
Chelsea
"I ask you to look both ways.  For the road to a knowledge of the 
stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom 
has been reached through the stars."
Sir Arthur Eddington, British astrophysicist (1882-1944), Stars 
and Atoms (1928), Lecture 1