Category: Cram Session
Hi everyone. I am thinking about going back to college this fall and I will have to face my fear of Algebra and take it before I take any other classes. I am not a good Braille reader and will probably have to use a talking text book. I would like to know what items I will need to succeed in this class. I saw some of the other post on this subject and have a clue but as someone who has never done anything but basic math; I need all the help I can get.
PS. I know I will be taking pre-algebra to start off with.
Thanks
Colleen
you, will, need, braille.
Believe me honey, I hate braille, thought I'd be swoof and not need it, you do. You can't keep all those equasions straight otherwise. So bone up on that.
Um, Graph paper. my braillest puffpainted the X and Y axis, and I used wicky sticks. Cut them up, squish them into dots, tada, you got points on your graph. Forget what sighties say about taking X to the other side and subtracting seven.
Just picture x+4 one one side of the equals sign, and 8 on the other. Then just, bring over the +4, switch it's sign, and yeah. Sorry, it's just that sighties tried to explain algebra to me, and it confused the hell out of me.
That's about all I can say.
I taught myself braille, only grade 1 nd 2, not nemith...i knwo the basic liek the number and plus and all that...but non of the other nemith. i did algebra 1, 2, geometry, and colelge algebra allgerbal . i did the equasions in my head. so yes it can be done. Good luck.
The biggest thing is to get over your fear of algebra. It is a scary subject and it is not the easiest, but I find people spend so much time being afraid of it they don't have energy to actually do it.
second (or third) the braille way, being the easiest and most intuitive way to learn algebra, but you may want to check out MathTalk as an alternative to read equations. I'm only starting to try it out myself so I can't help you much with that at the moment but could later on.
I'm brushing up on a lot of math stuff for my CFA certification exams and possibly going into a master's degree in finance or statistics so if you need lots of help you can message me off list and I may be able to help, no promises but I'll try. Tehre's also a very good math mailing list for the blind, I'll dig up the address and send you.
cheers
-B
Good god! U did it all in your head? Wow. That's...amazing. Yeah, your gonna need braille to do this. Its a pain in the ass, but you'll get through it.
Hm. I used to do most of it in mmy head until algebra 2, where they forced me to write out my equations. Writing them all out made me lazy. But I'd agree it's very hard to do without being able to look at it in braille, at least the original equation.
yeah, I get excited about math, in a bad way. I start thinking of the most difficult first. Yeah, pre algebra and alg. 1 will be a breeze. And you'll need a graphing calculator for algebra 2. I haven't used any of the nifty little programs out there, since I live in the middle of nowheresville, I had someone read it to me!
But yes, if you're having problems figuring stuff out, braille is the way to go.
And B, statistics, is the most God awful thing I have ever taken in my life.
I really never saw the use of braille for equations and the like. I am pretty conceptual anyway and really do not depend on the paper. i mainly use my computer to work out some problems though. For math and accessibility you can go the hard way and learn LaTeX or get math type and produce it that way. i do most of the stuff in my head. i got to algebra two and the logs were harder than the rest of things to compute, though everything was alright. The ones I had to do on paper were obviously inverse functions and most of what dealth with matrices.