Project Math Access DVD 01 - Primary Grade Levels - Part 02 Transcript Start Audio Description: Part two, student interview, learning Nemeth code. KAPPERMAN: And your braille skills are pretty good... ...how long have you been reading braille? JOHN: Well, I started reading braille when I was in Preschool, which was at about age 4 and I had it completely mastered by the time I got into, I want to say my last year of Kindergarten, maybe first year of First grade. So overall I would say that over two years I had math and all the contractions in Grade II braille mastered. KAPPERMAN: And do you Nemeth Code pretty well? JOHN: Yes. That‘s howl braille all my math work, is using the Nemeth Code. KAPPERMAN: How did you learn Nemeth Code? Tell me about how that happened. JOHN: Basically, I learned all of the numbers in the regular code first and then after I got real familiar with that, then my teacherjust kind of said “okay, today we're going to do the numbers and we're going to do them in Nemeth“ and she explained to me instead of using like dots 1-4-5 to make a 4, you use dots 2-5-6. And we would do weekly these little worksheets where she would ask me to braille certain numbers in Nemeth Code and we would judge how accurate I was from week to week. And you know gradually that improved and then you know, that was about the time that my classmates were actually starting addition and subtraction, and so then theyjust introduced me to the plus and the minus sign as we went, so really, I was learning both things at the same time which worked out real convenient. KAPPERMAN: So you just started out with basic, what Nemeth Code numbers looked like and then just as you learned the mathematics, studying mathematics along with your sighted peers, you just learned whatever symbols everybody else was studying, you were studying those symbols in the braille math code? Is that correct? JOHN: Yes KAPPERMAN: Good, okay. So as when you got into Algebra, that‘s when the various Algebraic expressions, you were introduced to those then, just as they came up in the books? JOHN: Yes, however, I did know what parentheses and things looked like beforehand. That part of the Nemeth Code I actually learned a little bit before Algebra started. KAPPERMAN: But as, but generally, as the symbols came to the fore, as they came up in your lessons, that‘s when you learned them and your teachers told you how the meanings of this and that symbol, is that correct? JOHN: Yes and we would also do a little bit more practice on them just to make sure that I had all the symbols correct.