Stories - experiences around people living with disability
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SHARI'S TRIP TO NEMITH CAMP
In August I went to Auckland for a Nemith Camp for four days. Nemith is Braille Maths. Kids who are at a high level in Braille from all round New Zealand got selected to go up to it. We went to learn how to do measurements and make graphs in Braille. It was really fun! I learned a good trick for doing the 11 times table. Say you've got 33 x 11. OK, you have 33, so you say, 3+3= 6. So you put 6 as the middle number and you've got 33 of each side of it, so the answer is 363! Try it, it works!
So the camp was fun, but it was really hard. We worked from 9.00 am 'till about 4.00pm. We had a morning tea and lunch break but still. I thought I was going to have no school for three days but...not even!
Braille Maths is more complicated than ordinary maths. There are cells, with different combinations. Like, there are six dots in the whole Braille language, and different combinations make different things. So if you're brailling an equation and you get one dot out, it can all go wrong. So you've got to remember a lot of things.
I'm what's called a dual user – I use both Nemith and also ordinary maths at school. I go out of the classroom with Jenny, who's my RTV (Resource Teacher for the Visually Impaired) to do Nemith with her. I don’t mind going out of the classroom too much – sometimes it's OK because we're doing boring stuff. But sometimes I miss out on really fun things. But it's OK, because I'm learning other important stuff when I'm out with Jenny.