[blindkid] Elementary math question

[Arielle Silverman]

Hi Brandon,

I'm a congenitally blind adult and I normally don't find visual stuff
that useful, but I remember the number line helping me a lot,
especially with understanding the concept of negative numbers.
When I learned fractions I understood the numerator being on the left
and the denominator being on the right (of the slash) rather than top
and bottom as sighted people see it.
Arielle

On 10/2/13, Debby B <bwbddl at yahoo.com> wrote:
> One thing that REALLY helped Winona was when we convinced the school to pull
> out the MathWindow. We were able to set things up, for example fractions.
> Once we set them up vertically it was like the light bulbs came on!
>
>
> Debby
> bwbddl at yahoo.com
>
> ~"Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can
> read."~Mark Twain
>
>
> ________________________________
>  From: b&s <lanesims at gmail.com>
> To: blindkid at nfbnet.org
> Sent: Wednesday, October 2, 2013 7:27 AM
> Subject: [blindkid] Elementary math question
>
>
> Emilia is now in 4th grade. I have been going in occasionally to
> help/observe during gen ed math time. I have always understood that the
> teaching of math (and all subjects for that matter) is vision centric. This
> is just a fact of life and I've been under the impression that teaching a
> blind kid is just a matter of tweaking the same information that is taught
> to the sighted kids. However, What struck me yesterday was the possibility
> that entire portions of the math curriculum may be fundamentally dependent
> on a visual approach, so that the issue becomes one, not of transcribing,
> but of truly translating the concepts to an entirely different language….and
> possibly even throwing out portions of the curriculum. This came up while
> thinking about number lines. Number lines figure heavily in the teaching and
> testing at this level. Emilia has a brailled number line at school that does
> a reasonable job of transcribing the visual information. She can read the
>  number line and mimic what other kids are doing with some effort. My
> question is whether a brailled number line is really useful to a
> congenitally blind student to help with understanding the underlying
> concepts?….or does it just make us sighted folk feel good about seeing the
> blind kid do the same thing the sighted kids are doing? Is she really
> learning the material?
>
> Unless I'm missing something, the abacus seems to cover the same territory
> and more as the number line. I don't even know how to approach the notion of
> the hundreds chart, which again, is available in braille, but is it really
> useful? If the answer is no, then there is the question of how to approach
> the issue of class participation, when everyone else is using these tools
> and concepts.
>
> I plan to talk to a couple of congenitally blind adult friends to get their
> perspective on this stuff. Any enlightenment from parents and others here
> would be great also.
>
> Thanks, Brandon
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