Dyscalculia is a learning disability, a lot like dyslexia, but with math and numbers. Everyone knows what dyslexia is, but for some reason, dyscalculia isn’t as well known. I want people to know about this so no more kids are gonna believe uneducated adults who tells them that they’re just lazy and no more kids are going to think they’re just hopeless idiots when they try and try but just can’t understand. It happened to me, and I won’t let it happen to anyone else.
It’s surprisingly common and is often linked to ADHD. If you’ve ever had issues, look it up – you might find things fall into place for you, too.
- Difficulty reading analog clocks[14]
- Inability to comprehend financial planning or budgeting, sometimes
even at a basic level; for example, estimating the cost of the items in a
shopping basket or balancing a checkbook.- Inconsistent results in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
- Difficulty with multiplication, subtraction, addition, and division tables, mental arithmetic, etc.
- Problems with differentiating between left and right.
- A “warped” sense of spatial awareness, or an understanding of
shapes, distance, or volume that seems more like guesswork than actual
comprehension.- Difficulty with time, directions, recalling schedules, sequences of
events. Difficulty keeping track of time. Frequently late or early.- Poor memory (retention & retrieval) of math concepts; may be
able to perform math operations one day, but draw a blank the next. May
be able to do book work but then fails tests.- Difficulty reading musical notation.
Difficulty with choreographed dance steps.- Having particular difficulty mentally estimating the measurement of
an object or distance (e.g., whether something is 3 or 6 meters (10 or
20 feet) away).- When writing, reading and recalling numbers, mistakes may occur in
the areas such as: number additions, substitutions, transpositions,
omissions, and reversals.- Inability to grasp and remember mathematical concepts, rules, formulae, and sequences.
- Inability to concentrate on mentally intensive tasks.
I can’t even comprehend what it might be like being a human who doesn’t have all of these characteristics. I don’t know how a brain can possibly just “remember” how to do long division or know what ten feet looks like.
I can’t even accept that a car is more than like nine feet long. Ours is fifteen feet long, and even standing next to it, my brain is POSITIVE it’s small enough to fit in a bathroom.
@sunshine-soda look at those bullet points! It’s me! There’s actually a word it!
Wait a car is more than 9 feet long? I feel like that is a really long list, but I’ve known since high school I mix up my numbers. I’ve even referred to it to explain why as “almost like I have dyslexia but just with numbers”. Didn’t realize knowing how big or small a thing is is related to that.
This feels so familiar.
It me
(no literally, I have this)
I have this!
Tag: dyscalculia
You, an intellectual: 9+7=16
Me, with ADHD: if you take 1 from 9 and give it to 7 thats 8+8 and 8×2 is 16
Someone, usually a Teacher: NOT LIKE THAT YOU HEATHEN
I teach common core and I literally encourage kids to explain their answers in this way. And it’s so validating as a teacher with ADHD because that’s how my brain works anyway and I know it’s how a lot of kids’ brains work too. And honestly, if you’re getting the right answer, who cares how you get it?
This is decomposition of numbers and I actively teach this.
This is why I hated when you had to show your work, because when it came to math in school my brain worked differently than you are typically taught. It also didn’t help that I was on the mathelete team and we were literally taught shortcuts like this that were helpful competitively but meant when it came to “show your work” quizzes I’d lose points because my brain would go from A to C and skip step B but still get the answer. I was the kid good at math who couldn’t help friends struggling because what made sense in my head didn’t make sense out of it.
I mean, I was taught basic math in the 80s in rural Montana. And no one ever had any issue with things like that. The idea that anyone would is baffling to me. I mean maybe in the 1800 or something I don’t know…
Glad your experience was a bit better, from the sound of things.
My experience at the elementary school level in rural Virginia in the ‘80s was that usually if you didn’t show work in the exact same steps as the example problems in the textbook, it was wrong. Sometimes the correct answer would get partial credit; sometimes not even that, depending on the teacher.
I am also one of the people with the combo of (then-unrecognized) dyscalculia, and a fairly easy grasp on concepts. Which meant that I have often needed to figure out my own shortcuts and workarounds to actually get things done in a way that made sense. That…did not go over too well when we were supposed to be learning the basics.
Some of the alternate approaches that I figured out may well have had problems, and not been more generally applicable. Some explanation of why this might be a sensible or not-so-great different approach to the problem would have been handy at times. (And I did start getting more feedback like that later in school.)
The kicker, though? I have to suspect that many/most of the elementary school generalist teachers couldn’t have offered that type of more involved explanations if they had wanted to. A lot of the time, “but, that’s not how it’s done in the book!” may well have been the main way to judge correctness they had available. Largely thanks to their own math education, without as much focus on how and why the numbers are doing what they are.
(Which isn’t really down to time/place, BTW, other than some bigger longterm problems with math education in the US. Seems like an unfortunately common thing.)
You, an intellectual: 9+7=16
Me, with ADHD: if you take 1 from 9 and give it to 7 thats 8+8 and 8×2 is 16
Someone, usually a Teacher: NOT LIKE THAT YOU HEATHEN
This is literally how I would have done it
9 is a hungry bitch and takes one from 7, making it 10+6=16
VALID
This is why, on my IQ tests as a teenager, during the arithmetic processing portions, the test administrator asked me to walk her through how I was getting the answers.
Because I was coming up with the answers pretty quickly, but it was clear from other portions of the test that my raw processing speed is actually pretty slow. So when she asked, I told her I was very quickly making little easily-crunched shortcuts like these.
Which is all well and good for as long as it works, but the problem is that you can frequently use these shortcuts to fake being good at raw processing tasks right up until someone gives you a task that can’t be shortcutted, and expects you to do it quickly because you seem to process like a normal person.
And then they probably accuse you of being suddenly lazy or stupid.
I didn’t know this was adhd
I do this all the time. Always have.
Huh…
…Wait. What.
Dyscalculia is a learning disability, a lot like dyslexia, but with math and numbers. Everyone knows what dyslexia is, but for some reason, dyscalculia isn’t as well known. I want people to know about this so no more kids are gonna believe uneducated adults who tells them that they’re just lazy and no more kids are going to think they’re just hopeless idiots when they try and try but just can’t understand. It happened to me, and I won’t let it happen to anyone else.
It’s surprisingly common and is often linked to ADHD. If you’ve ever had issues, look it up – you might find things fall into place for you, too.
- Difficulty reading analog clocks[14]
- Inability to comprehend financial planning or budgeting, sometimes
even at a basic level; for example, estimating the cost of the items in a
shopping basket or balancing a checkbook.- Inconsistent results in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
- Difficulty with multiplication, subtraction, addition, and division tables, mental arithmetic, etc.
- Problems with differentiating between left and right.
- A “warped” sense of spatial awareness, or an understanding of
shapes, distance, or volume that seems more like guesswork than actual
comprehension.- Difficulty with time, directions, recalling schedules, sequences of
events. Difficulty keeping track of time. Frequently late or early.- Poor memory (retention & retrieval) of math concepts; may be
able to perform math operations one day, but draw a blank the next. May
be able to do book work but then fails tests.- Difficulty reading musical notation.
Difficulty with choreographed dance steps.- Having particular difficulty mentally estimating the measurement of
an object or distance (e.g., whether something is 3 or 6 meters (10 or
20 feet) away).- When writing, reading and recalling numbers, mistakes may occur in
the areas such as: number additions, substitutions, transpositions,
omissions, and reversals.- Inability to grasp and remember mathematical concepts, rules, formulae, and sequences.
- Inability to concentrate on mentally intensive tasks.
I can’t even comprehend what it might be like being a human who doesn’t have all of these characteristics. I don’t know how a brain can possibly just “remember” how to do long division or know what ten feet looks like.
I can’t even accept that a car is more than like nine feet long. Ours is fifteen feet long, and even standing next to it, my brain is POSITIVE it’s small enough to fit in a bathroom.
This is the most me thing I’ve ever read on this site. I can’t read analog clocks I can’t recall number sequences etc.
WELL THEN
I have this! It wasn’t really a “thing” when I was growing up, so I was just inexplicably “bad at math” and had “poor spatial skilled,”’etc. Sometimes I wonder what I could have accomplished if this had been a more well-known disorder.
Dyscalculia is a learning disability, a lot like dyslexia, but with math and numbers. Everyone knows what dyslexia is, but for some reason, dyscalculia isn’t as well known. I want people to know about this so no more kids are gonna believe uneducated adults who tells them that they’re just lazy and no more kids are going to think they’re just hopeless idiots when they try and try but just can’t understand. It happened to me, and I won’t let it happen to anyone else.
It’s surprisingly common and is often linked to ADHD. If you’ve ever had issues, look it up – you might find things fall into place for you, too.
- Difficulty reading analog clocks[14]
- Inability to comprehend financial planning or budgeting, sometimes
even at a basic level; for example, estimating the cost of the items in a
shopping basket or balancing a checkbook.- Inconsistent results in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
- Difficulty with multiplication, subtraction, addition, and division tables, mental arithmetic, etc.
- Problems with differentiating between left and right.
- A “warped” sense of spatial awareness, or an understanding of
shapes, distance, or volume that seems more like guesswork than actual
comprehension.- Difficulty with time, directions, recalling schedules, sequences of
events. Difficulty keeping track of time. Frequently late or early.- Poor memory (retention & retrieval) of math concepts; may be
able to perform math operations one day, but draw a blank the next. May
be able to do book work but then fails tests.- Difficulty reading musical notation.
Difficulty with choreographed dance steps.- Having particular difficulty mentally estimating the measurement of
an object or distance (e.g., whether something is 3 or 6 meters (10 or
20 feet) away).- When writing, reading and recalling numbers, mistakes may occur in
the areas such as: number additions, substitutions, transpositions,
omissions, and reversals.- Inability to grasp and remember mathematical concepts, rules, formulae, and sequences.
- Inability to concentrate on mentally intensive tasks.
I can’t even comprehend what it might be like being a human who doesn’t have all of these characteristics. I don’t know how a brain can possibly just “remember” how to do long division or know what ten feet looks like.
I can’t even accept that a car is more than like nine feet long. Ours is fifteen feet long, and even standing next to it, my brain is POSITIVE it’s small enough to fit in a bathroom.
This is the most me thing I’ve ever read on this site. I can’t read analog clocks I can’t recall number sequences etc.
Yes. Me.
I’m 45 and still have trouble with analog clocks and telling left from right.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 