Project Math Access DVD 05 - Geometry - Part 06
Transcript Start

Audio Description: Part six; student interview.

JOHN: As I’ve said before, measuring the angles with the protractor has got to be one of the hardest things to do in Geometry. The protractor is a lot bigger than the regular protractors are, therefore it covers up more of the line and you just saw me put a Wikki Stix... on that line to extend it and make it so that it extends past the protractor and then I could feel it and tell how many degrees that angle was. That solution, however, has a couple of problems. 

First of all, we had to do a lot of work in the math book and the math book had some really,... really short angles and short lines and on top of that, they would include two problems a page sometimes. Not to mention, furthermore, that the paper is Thermoform, which is a plastic-type of paper and that the Wikki Stix wax... once applied, would kind of stick to it and make it hard to get off. 

So I did run into problems, some problems that were really complex and they involved 3 to 4 angles a figure, I would just go in with my... math teacher and I would just explain that I know how to measure these angles and this... is what you would do to measure them, but I wouldn't actually do them, because they were just too complicated... too complex to do, with the figures I was given in my math book. 

STICKEN: When that happened, John, when you explained that you weren’t able to do that... because of the way the problems were set up in your book, what did the teacher do? 

JOHN: I showed her how the problems were set up in the book and depending on how much time she had, she would do one of two things. 

First of all, if she was running kind of low on time, she would say okay John, how do you do this? And I would go step-by-step. Okay, well if you wanted to measure this angle you would put your protractor screw on the center and I would basically explain... the process that I just did. 

If she had a little bit more time, then we might reconstruct the angle in question out of Wikki Stixs. We might use rubber bands and push pins in a board that we had upstairs to reconstruct it so lines would be long enough for me to measure it. It all depended. The main important thing was though was that I didn’t run into a problem like that on my tests, because all those lines... Miss Eisenhut made sure to make those long enough.

TEACHER: And one of the advantages that a sighted person has again with the protractor is that when they are measuring lines,... they can see through the protractor, the print lines, so that they can extend it themselves... up to where the markings are, whereas a visually impaired or blind student... cannot trace the lines underneath the protractor because they can’t see that they’re even under there.