Neighbourhood Tag
You know when you start to find the sound of your own voice horrible? Has anyone else had that regarding blogging? Anyway... Been slightly repelled lately by the idea of writing anything, whether posts or comments, although I've been keeping up with my neighbours' blogs (some wonderful stuff going around, by the way). So by way of keeping my oar in, I'm responding to Sheri's tag (thanks Sheri), which I've been putting off for a week now:
The rules of the game get posted at the beginning. Each player answers the questions about themselves. At the end of the post, the player then tags 5 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.
1. What was I doing 10 years ago?
A postgraduate course at the University of Birmingham; rehearsing for a play (we took it to the Edinburgh Festival that summer and did surprisingly well); supply teaching. I got a literary agent in 1998, thanks to a sort of anti-self-help m/s I wrote mostly while drunk, and was being paraded around publishing houses and touted hilariously as 'the new Dale Carnegie', so I thought I was on the verge of becoming famous. I crumbled in every meeting I had with editors. It was just disastrous.
2. What are 5 things on my to-do list for today?
1. Write this
2. Work until my brain has turned to jam
3. After work, visit a 92 year old Irish woman called Rosaleen.
4. Pick up some fish 'n' chips to eat on the walk home from Rose's. She lives near one of the best fish 'n' chip shops in Birmingham.
5. Make 45 minute overdue catch-up phone call to a friend during remainder of walk home.
3. Snacks I enjoy:
In the office we're into peanut butter on rice crackers in a big way. Mmm, healthy.
4. Things I would do if I were a billionaire:
Can it be a UK billion (£1000,000,000,000)?
First: suffer paralysis over the immense moral responsibility. While trying to figure out how best to serve humanity, start buying a couple of little treats for myself and my loved ones. End up with so many treats I have to buy some new cupboards etc. Figure I still have plenty left for humanity. Suddenly my loved ones and I have all these cupboards. Buy some houses for the cupboards to go in. Buy more stuff to fill houses. Buy a special house I can go to when I want to refelct on how best to serve humanity with the money I have left. Pretty soon my life is a Snoop Dogg video. Get into legal trouble because someone ODs while I was letting one of my many bitches fly my gold plane and there was a big panic and my plane crashed into an orphanage. My gold plane! Get depressed. Pay millions for therapy. Therapist suggests I visit an ashram in India. Go to India. Come back and find my houses burned down by the boyfriend of that cow who crashed my gold plane. My gold plane! My houses! Die alone, broke, wishing that I'd just given it to charity. But which charity? Still don't know. Any, I suppose.
5. Places I have lived:
Lancashire (0-10), Reading (11-19), Surrey (19-22 - English degree), Kent (22-23 - teacher training), Birmingham (postgrad). Still in Brum.
6. Jobs I have had:
Busboy, cleaner, singing waiter, teacher, admin guy, resourcer (now). Was an actual novelist for a while, until the advance ran out and I couldn't write the follow-up I'd been commissioned to write and I ended up working for my future mother in law. Have nearly finished writing something else.
7. Bloggers I am tagging who I will enjoy getting to know better:
Sorry to bend the rules, but I'm tagging any of my neighbours who'd like to do this. I know some have done it already, but my lunch break is over and I haven't time to cross people off my list, so my apologies to you folks for the double tag.
My Groups
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Atheists Updated: 16 minutes ago
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Freethinkers Updated: 16 minutes ago
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Separation of Church and State Updated: 1 hour ago
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Comments
You can't let them near anything, I swear. Never let someone in hotpants play around with your undercarriage. (So to speak.)
Been reading and enjoying your posts, by the way, not to mention your comments in other people's threads. Keep meaning to leave comments, but everything I write lately seems - as you've addressed in a post - smug. Argg.
Time to switch on the diamond-edged plasma cinema screen and hit the hot tub.
Should I just give you the money? As an ex-teacher (I think the term is recovering teacher) I very much like the idea of a school where you have to, you know, work hard and behave in order to merit inclusion...
There's another idea that I've always wanted to try in education, but I doubt there would be any significant number of students available. I'd like to run a "gifted program" of sorts for blind students with above-average IQ's. The program would simply teach a slightly advanced curriculum in an accessible format, with the addition of classes on advanced information tech, job skills, advocacy skills, home ec, and other skills that a blind person needs to live independently. The goal would be to turn out a group of students ready for the adult world.
I've actually always wanted to develop a successful means of teaching mathematics and science to non-sighted students. I recall my own frustration in this area going through school. I discovered as an adult that I actually enjoy both higher math and physics, but over the course of a standard public education, neither of those options were ever available.
One of the biggest problems in teaching mathematics to students who can't see what you're writing on the board is language. For example, when you describe this formula: "negative b plus or minus the square root of b squared minus 4ac over 2a" - if I can't see what you're writing when you say that, I don't know how to write that formula. Granted, there is a clearer way to describe that formula, but most instructors do not bother with that much longer description. If I don't know what formula is being written, how am I supposed to know how to use it? The lesson stops before it even starts.
Another major problem is attitude - the personal bias of the instructor. I've often encountered instructors who are either unable or unwilling to teach a blind student. Most see the barriers to learning as inurmountable - others, however, have the attitude that sighted students are more important, and they shouldn't waste their time and effort on a student who will just grow up to collect public assistance.[1]
The absolute worst occurs in schools that have some sort of special ed program. Math and science teachers often just abandon blind students to the vision resource instructor - a person with a degree in special education who often knows less math than the student!
A third problem is ignorance - and this occurs on all sides. There is plenty of technology out there to facilitate accommodation in teaching blind students - but many people, even special education teachers, don't know it exists! The student is certainly left in the dark (okay, even I may go to Hell for that pun). Parents and school administrators may not know about the laws requiring accommodation, parents may not know about advocacy groups that exist to help them, and school administrators may not know about available funding for assistive technology. This serves only to create even more barriers for the student.
Because blindness is not binary (there is a long continuum between "blind" and "sighted"), adaptation for students is highly individualized. Students may have some usable vision, and respond to the use of telescopes or visual aids in class. Others may not, and may need Braille materials and/or more individualized instruction. (The difficulties with Braille math are an entire, nightmarish other story!)
I actually have a vision of a dream school for the blind with no blackboards or overhead projectors, and the best technology available to each student. But that's not something that will be happening in real life any time soon.
[1] This often becomes self-fulfilling prophecy, as students who are not properly educated frequently can't graduate high school, and thus cannot obtain sustainable employment. I'm a fortunate exception to this rule.
Sorry, had to pop off to see the aforementioned Rose.
It all seems pretty daunting. Given that 'doing' maths has always been associated with the written language of maths, as you said, conceptualising how we might do without visual references is hard enough, never mind conceptualising how to teach and learn maths.
It would be great for non-sighted kids to be able to get immersed in mathematical concepts and operations very early on, and get comfortable in that world via a kinesthetic connection. Simple maths can be done with physical objects you can feel and put together and subtract from each other, and once kids have become comfortable with basic concepts that way, it might be possible to create for them tactile resources that facilitate more complex functions, rather than lose them as soon as the sums get too complicated to solve using bricks and the nightmare of Braille maths etc has to begin. I suppose I'm thinking naively of a range of progressively more sophisticated abacuses that can handle stuff like algebra... Of course, that wouldn't take kids to a particularly advanced stage, but it would kindle and maintain an interest / competence in maths during the earlier stages of schooling.
Abacuses! Dear God, I'm such a Luddite. Anyway, I think that resources designed for very young kids would help prevent blind children from growing up feeling 'locked out' of the world of maths.
Hmm. Anyway, your billion dollars is currently waiting for you in a bank in Nigeria. If you could just send me your bank details...
Heheh - Nigeria. I once taught basic computer use to a class full of 60-80+ year-olds. After showing them how to set up e-mail accounts and send messages, I warned them about some common scams, including the Nigerian scam. The women were floored - "who would be stupid enough to fall for that?" they asked.
Well, about one year later, my twenty five year-old brother comes to me asking me how to contact the American embassy in Nigeria. Apparently, a lovely American girl has contacted him, and she is trapped over there and needs some help getting a ticket back home.
It actually took several hours and some googling befolre he believed that it was a scam.
<grin>
John
I really can't overemphasize the problem with mathematical language. But in addition to the problem I've mentioned above, sometimes even if you use the right language - you're still speaking something that is foreign to a blind student.
Bear in mind that some of the concepts that may be prerequisites for a class you're teaching have not been taught to a blind student. My sighted peers learned about "pi" in sixth grade. I was almost in high school before I had any idea what the number looked like. The teachers had always written it on the board - so for over 2 years, I had heard intermittently about something called "pi," but had never actually seen the number. My eighth-grade vision resource teacher was kind of shocked when I asked her what that Hebrew character that kept appearing in the book was. :-)
I never said it would be easy, but it's got to be doable. Though I suppose it would be akin to trying to teach a blind person to paint.
Here you've hit the nail on the head. Mathematics is a language. If you can learn to speak Greek, Italian, German, Hebrew, or any other language you should be able to learn to speak Math.
Here you are confusing the symbol for pi with the number it represents. Recognizing the symbol and understanding what it represents are two separate things. I hope your vision resource teacher learned as much as you did that day!
I'm actually referring more to the process of learning here than the actual number pi. The problem with having been in math class for 2 years and never having seen the symbol for the number pi was that inherently I could neither read nor write equations with it. I didn't know what it was or what it did. The concept did not exist without the language to describe it.
Some of the basics of teaching should be fairly simple - tactile models, braille graph paper, etc. I agree with you that it is doable - and certainly more so than trying to teach painting.
If you went through two years of school without understanding the concept behind the symbol I can only assume that your sighted classmates were as clueless about it as you. Sadly, this is far too common a problem in our educational system.
John