teaching the vision impaired

[thubby]

so I'm a tutor and I recently acquired a student who is blind. the subject is statics which relies heavily on geometry and diagrams.

anyone with experience, either as a student or a teacher, for dealing with this sort of thing?

[THAC0]

More information required. Are they totally blind, legally blind, etc?

[Douglas]

No direct experience, but my mother has a close friend who is blind. Making copies of the diagrams where all the lines are raised, lowered, textured, or otherwise easily felt by hand, would help a lot. I have no idea how easy or cheap it is to do that, though.

[thubby]

More information required. Are they totally blind, legally blind, etc?

he's not totally blind, but reading and even working on a board is out of the question.

the way he describes it, his best is the ability to track me around the room.

[THAC0]

Really, a lot of it is individualized. Some people do well with enlarged, reversed color. Others don't. Raised lines or some other tangible representation of diagrams may be your best bet.

[mucat]

I would ask the student how he usually deals with spatial reasoning; he's got a lot more experience with the question than any of us!

If he's not certain how to answer that (or even if he is) give him some simple problems involving objects in space -- some of which you can describe to him with words, some with very large, bold diagrams on a whiteboard (which may or may not turn out to be legible to him), and some with physical props. Even the ones where you use props to provide information, ask him to reason out something that cannot be directly measured from the physical setup.

The important thing isn't whether he can answer these trial puzzles, but what methods he finds most useful to reason about them. Does he find it challenging to take in the initial information about the problem, but he can then reason spatially in his head? Rather than try to mentally model the whole situation, does he prefer to manipulate physical objects? Does he like to reduce the spatial arrangements to equations as soon as possible, and take it mathematically from there? Any of these styles would lead to a very distinct teaching strategy.

(And whichever styles he DOESN'T favor could be seen as tools to be developed rather than simply "not his learning style". The best problem solvers can draw on a whole range of different approaches to avoid becoming stuck!)