When I was a teenager, I was still passing for sighted, although I couldn't see the board, and had no help or aids at all. My eye doctor, family, and teachers would just say, Oh, you just need to work harder, so I retook every year of high school math during summer school, geometry three times.
When I returned to college as a fully blind person, the math professors told me blind people couldn't do math, and the disabled students serivices office told me blind people couldn't do math, and it took me two semesters of fighting just to get into the classes I needed to graduate. The DSS did it's best to help me fail by not scanning any of my books (Alexx's mother transcribed them for me), messing up my tests (no one who transcribed my tests knew math, so they either fucked up things like notation and where the parentheses went, or they just left out whole parts with a note saying things like, well, you're blind so you can't do linear algebra). Also, the adaptive computer lab was in the basement so the guy who supposedly ran it really just played games in his office all day instead of keeping the computers and braille printer working and the one time I said that this wasn't a fair testing situation, he called me a bitch, among other things.
Basically, the DSS pressured me to "waive" my math and science requirements, but when I asked if this would still allow me to graduate, they wouldn't answer. No reply at all, even in face to face conversations.
Sorry for the rant, but I'm still pissed about this because I know this crap still goes on.
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Date: 2012-10-11 03:52 pm (UTC)When I returned to college as a fully blind person, the math professors told me blind people couldn't do math, and the disabled students serivices office told me blind people couldn't do math, and it took me two semesters of fighting just to get into the classes I needed to graduate. The DSS did it's best to help me fail by not scanning any of my books (Alexx's mother transcribed them for me), messing up my tests (no one who transcribed my tests knew math, so they either fucked up things like notation and where the parentheses went, or they just left out whole parts with a note saying things like, well, you're blind so you can't do linear algebra). Also, the adaptive computer lab was in the basement so the guy who supposedly ran it really just played games in his office all day instead of keeping the computers and braille printer working and the one time I said that this wasn't a fair testing situation, he called me a bitch, among other things.
Basically, the DSS pressured me to "waive" my math and science requirements, but when I asked if this would still allow me to graduate, they wouldn't answer. No reply at all, even in face to face conversations.
Sorry for the rant, but I'm still pissed about this because I know this crap still goes on.