What is it that you exactly do to help or guide students that are blind or have low vision?
What is your understanding of the role of a teacher for students who are blind?
What is your biggest challenge while working with blind students?
I would interview someone who is blind or possibly someone who teaches blind students. They can help me by telling me either what was their best way of learning to read and write or what was the best teaching style for teaching blind students to read and write. Two possible questions I can ask are what was the most difficult thing to do when learning how to read and write? and What was the very first step you took when teaching students to read and write?
One of my sources written by Maha Kochen talks about how blind people learn braille to read and write. I can use this source on my research project because it addresses the difficulties that visually impaired learners face and the difficulties they have with learning braille to read and write. It talks about the benefits that comes with learning braille and also different problems that come with only using braille as the way to read and write. Lastly it gives alternative ways to overcome the problem. I think that this source would be a background source. I believe this because a background source is a source that you can rely on and it is composed of what I believe to be facts. I would use my source as a background source by getting facts about what raille is and how it benefits visually impaired people. The paper is divided into different sections, so the sections that I will be using is braille background and importance, The important role of braille, benefits of braille, challenges to accessing braille, and solutions and alternative intervention strategies.
Someone that I would consider my sponsor is my mentor Shawn. He supports me in as many ways as you can think of. I can go to him for advice about anything weather it be about school, my friendship, relationship or something going on at home. He helps me study whenever I have an exam coming up and checks up on me every week to make sure I stay on top of my work. He also sends little inspirational texts in the beginning of every week. He wanted me to become goal oriented, so he makes me set out goals for the week so that I can know what to work on and do differently .He helps me get more involved on campus by taking me to events and telling me about good organizations to sign up for. Right now I’m on the C.O.R.E streat team; we just pub events that the we are holding to let everyone know about them, and I’m hoping one day to be on the e-board. Shawn represents Brandt’s concept because he supports and teaches me literacy. I would also consider my advisory teacher from high school, Ms. Martin, to be my my sponsor because she always act as more than just a teacher. She acts like a mom, I can go to her whenever I need anything. She still supports me now while I’m in college by checking up on me. Ms. Martin represents Brandt’s concept because she has a lot of influence in the network, so she could hook me up with an internship if I needed her too and she also has a lot of money.
A piece of writing that I wrote in college that connects to the main idea 1.0: Writing is a social and rhetorical activity, was about a letter that we had to write to next year’s incoming freshman. In the letter we were instructed to write about how it feels to be in the Division of general studies, and give them some advice about how to be successful in their first year of college. This connects to the main idea that writing is a very social process because that’s exactly what I was doing. I was potentially socializing with a freshman that was going to be reading my letter next year. In my letter I was writing to a specific audience, this reflexes the idea that writers tend to address the needs and interests of a particular audience. I would say that this assignment didn’t have anything to do with 1.6: writing is not natural because I was basically writing the way I speak. I didn’t use any slang words but my writing was more informal than formal. I wrote to my audience as if I already knew them, I didn’t worry too much about sounding dumb.
My Aunt is a Teacher so growing up I always got corrected on my English. Whenever I was talking to her or having a conversation with a family member and I used the words “finna”, “bout”, or “ain’t” she would always stop me and say “what did you just say”. At first I didn’t know what she was talking about so I would repeat myself and she would say “you not finna do anything” and would make me say my entire sentence over using correct English. Still to this day she does that and she told me that I will never get a good job talking like that. Just like I became used to using those slang words, she wanted to be used to using proper English. I believe everyone did, but I also got corrected on my writing in high school. As a whole my writing is just bad. Sometimes I would get corrected on my verb usage other times it would be things like commas or apostrophes. When ever I would email my advisory Teacher, Ms. Martin, I would use a lot of informal language like hey or wassup and not put periods at the end of my sentence. She would always reply with try again and no matter what I emailed her about she would never respond to my question or statement until I sent her a proper email. This reminds me my boyfriend would also correct me whenever I would use incorrect verb tense. It was always embarrassing because he says I sound like i’m uneducated. I believe that they always corrected me on my English, writing, or grammar not just because there was a correct way of speaking and writing, but also because as a minority I already face many barriers that many upper class students don’t and speaking and writing shouldn’t be one of them.
Thanks for joining me!
Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton
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