In the mathematics workshop at Al-Hadi Institution, pupils with special needs - deaf, blind and with learning difficulties - came, unusually and eagerly, to learn the language of numbers and letters, which for many of us was an unbearably dull subject!
You need no “secret” to discover Al-Hadi Institution for Hearing and Visual Impairment and Language and Communication Disorders, which belongs to Al-Mabarrat Charitable Association. The faces of its staff are bright and joyful, inhabited by an inner peace, because they are “grafted” with the testaments of its founder Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, who dwelt in minds and hearts and adorned every place in “Al-Hadi” with his pictures and his humane counsels.
In his office we were received by the institution's director Ismail Al-Zein, who presented the history of the institution founded by Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah in 1988, which set out to teach people with special needs - visually and hearing impaired, children suffering from intellectual disorders and others with autism. He announced that “the institution has worked on preparing educational programmes adapted to this category with the different particularity of each of them, and through which it applies standards of teaching quality and refines the skills of educators and trains them with the aim of acquiring expertise to teach”.
He praised the mathematics workshop project, which keeps pace, according to modern methods, with “a teaching strategy suited to people with special needs and with teaching mathematics in an enjoyable way through games that develop thinking, and several strategies, among them interactive teaching, teaching mathematics through theatre and drawing, and another project for which they choose a plan to carry out”.
We went to the workshop accompanied by the mathematics subject coordinator and the author of this workshop's initiative Ahmad Al-Husseini. The workshop was described by Al-Zein as “a room equipped with learning tools and means that help the blind and deaf pupil to touch abstract material”.
Learning mathematics is enjoyable!
Al-Husseini described the place, saying: “In the room there is an interactive board. Here on the wooden shelves are geometrical and measuring instruments, cubes and models that make it easier for the blind and the deaf to solve mathematical rules in a way that lends the lessons something of joy.” The pupil at the Al-Raja school for the deaf Ahmad Berjaoui said, in testimony recorded in a documentary specific to the institution, that he had become “fond of the subject”. He said in colloquial Arabic: “I love learning mathematics a lot because of the workshop. I've come to understand, and I find mathematics easier.”
Al-Husseini then returned to his explanation, saying: “Let us take for example the algebra workshop… If we want to add two algebraic expressions together. Here we have the algebra workshop, which consists of wooden pieces in two different colours to indicate the plus and minus signs for the deaf, and written in Braille for the blind.” In his view the pupil can add algebraic expressions, multiply them and write them in the form of prime factors.
Al-Husseini said that this “workshop has obliged us to organize applied activities whose aim is to strengthen love of the subject through the pupil's interaction with mathematics, and to develop the children's thinking in mental arithmetic and in exercises connected with real life”. He added: “This is translated through organizing competitions connected with several Islamic occasions and others about Deaf Day, White Cane Day, Al-Mabarrat Day and Education for All.”
The computer, according to Al-Husseini, has “a speaking programme for the blind through which a pupil can take mathematics examinations on the computer”. He said: “There are special tools in it for the deaf through which they can choose the best answer to an arithmetical question.”
The pupil Nour Khazaal of the Al-Nour school for the blind at the institution came in to us and said that “we no longer use paper to learn mathematics; rather we use manual means that help us to understand an equation…”
And when we put to Al-Husseini the question of what the equation is, he answered: “Al-Hadi has scientific projects that aim at linking abstract mathematical theories in a scientific project that a pupil can apply on the ground.”
This success has encouraged the training of “Al-Hadi”'s teachers to become skilled in application, and this is what the mathematics teacher of the second cycle Hussein Zaarour mentioned in his testimony, saying: “The workshop encouraged me to prepare model lessons and to learn discovery…”
For his part, Al-Zein stressed the pupils' excellence in scientific projects inside and outside Lebanon, saying: “For 10 years the pupils have taken part in projects organized by the American University of Beirut and in the science contest recently held by the National Council for Sciences at the UNESCO Palace, where we won the Council's prize, the Antoine Harb prize, and first place and the gold medal for the project ‘The Sliding Fingers' - a project that works by means of the fingers of the hand and helps in carrying out arithmetical operations in a simplified form to help the blind, the deaf and those with learning difficulties in these arithmetical operations…”
The most important thing, according to Al-Zein, is “that the institution obtained first place in the European finals 2014 in the competition for teaching mathematics through theatre held by the European
Le-Math organization, in which more than 20 European countries and more than 400 pupils took part in Nicosia. This competition for teaching mathematics aims at developing the rising generation's capacities in scientific research, enabling them to give lectures at conferences devoted to mathematics, and linking mathematics with real life - with theatre, music and literature… Al-Hadi Institution, by achieving a European accomplishment, dedicates this success to Lebanon and to Al-Mabarrat; and this is what led President Michel Sleiman to honour ‘Al-Hadi' for the occasion at the presidential palace and to present its team with a most appreciative shield…”
