Do You Have Dyscalculia?
Aka: Diss calculus? (Excerpts from past posts on the subject)
-Dyscalculia is described as a math dyslexia, and it’s true that in school algebra and word math problems related to time and distances made me feel like I was going to have a seizure, but dyscalculia is so much more than that. It’s a neurological disorder that affects sense of direction (up, down, left, right), impairs the ability to picture geographical location and mechanical processes, to balance checkbooks, read music, clocks and maps, count back money/change, remember a sequence of instruction, put names with faces and more. But maybe I’m in good company. Albert Einstein in his own words: “School came as a bore to me. It took up far too much time… I felt a downright fear of the mathematics class. The teacher pretended that algebra was a natural affair, to be taken for granted, whereas I didn’t even know what numbers really were. They were not flowers, not animals, not fossils; they were nothing that could be imagined, mere quantities that resulted from counting. To my confusion these quantities were now represented by letters, which signified sounds, so that it became impossible to hear them, so to speak.”
-Do you have difficulty reading graphs or charts? Do you have trouble learning athletic movements, dance steps, or anything that requires you to move your body in a certain sequence? Do you find it hard to stick to a budget or keep track of your finances? Do you find it difficult to do mental math and find yourself giving incorrect change or calculating a wildly inaccurate tip? Do you forget phone numbers or addresses, even just a few moments after they were said to you? Do you misplace objects around the house or get lost in familiar areas? Do you lose track when counting and need to use visual aids — like fingers — to help count? You likely have dyscalculia. Dyscalculia can be the cause of problems with time management, spatial recognition, and motor functions. Dyscalculia, often referred to as “math dyslexia,” is a learning disability (LD) that makes math problems confusing.
-As someone with dyscalculia, the time change is especially difficult because there’s a big component of directional and number impairment with the disability. Not only do I have to calculate every clock I see, I have to remember if the time went forward or backwards and which clocks have been changed and which ones haven’t.
-I still remember the first time I heard Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter. It was read out loud by my kindergarten teacher Mrs. Golden. I can viscerally recall how tense I was and scared for Peter, who couldn’t find the gate out of Mr. McGregor’s farm so that he could get back home. It’s interesting that I was so affected by the story and that it has been a theme in my life. I have dyscalculia, am terrible with directions and get anxiety about being lost.
-Playing chess is like driving in a city, and the chess pieces are like cars confusing me by going every which way in different directions. In an online list of specific symptoms that people like me with dyscalculia have, it actually says: Limited strategic planning ability for games like chess.
-Because I have Dyscalculia I can’t decide if my standards have gotten higher or lower.
-Dyscalculia sufferers may be easily become disoriented and have little or no sense of direction. They often have difficulties with time, measurement, left/right orientation, rules in games and spatial reasoning. But people with dyscalculia are often exceptional at reading and writing. People with dyscalculia are intuitive thinkers and are good at interpreting reality and processing knowledge, experiences and signs around them.
-As someone with dyscalculia who had a hard time reading analog clocks as a girl, I loved this story from This American Life: “Carl Duzen got a graduate degree in physics. He studied motion, electromagnetism. He spent a lot of his life deep in the study of space and time of numbers. He taught physics and mathematics for years. Carl was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s a year and a half ago at age 79. So, after decades of adulthood, it is suddenly appropriate for a 40-year-old doctor to ask him questions like, can you tell me who the president is? Or, can you “draw a clock?” “So I got a piece of paper. No matter what I– I just– I couldn’t– I couldn’t do it. Why is that so hard?” Carl said. To be clear, it’s not necessarily how to draw a clock that is difficult but figuring out why he couldn’t draw a clock.
Carl sat with his tools and his paper and his physicist’s desire to decompose the problem before him. He draws a very precise circle, split it into twelfths, and scrawled the words “superposition of three types” in tiny letters in the corner of the page. He explains, with Susan’s help, there are three layers of information here. There’s the hours that are represented from 1 through 12, even though there are 24 hours in a day. But then, there’s the second layer, which is the minutes. And a 1 represents not a 1 anymore, but 5 minutes. And a 2 represents 10. But Carl adds, after that layer is the second hand, which is now measuring 1 through 60 seconds. By the end of all this, I can’t believe this is the system we have for telling time. It’s insane. It’s a miracle anyone can ever just glance at their wrist and capture information, something Carl works very hard at…”
Dyscalculia is a mathematical disability that can occur in people from across the whole IQ range – often higher than average – along with difficulties with time, measurement, and spatial reasoning… The term was coined in the 1940s, but it was not until 1974 when the word was completely recognized by the work of a Czechoslovakian researcher Ladislav Kosc. When his work came out he defined the work as “a structural disorder of mathematical abilities.” His research proved that this learning disability was caused by impairments to certain parts of the brain that control mathematical calculations, and it was not because these people were ‘mentally handicapped…”- Wikipedia
-I was in denial about what kind of speller I was until the computer Spell Check came along and proved me to be less than average at it. Even more of a surprise was that when I looked at the corrected spelling of a word alongside my version of it, I sometimes couldn’t see any difference. My dad was an even worse speller. Whenever one of us kids would ask him how to spell something his answer was always the same and would go like this: “Daddy, how do you spell decision?” “It begins with a D,” he would announce. The various forms of dyslexia and dyscalculia that run in my family and cause me to consistently misspell words like decision, exercise, or restaurant also causes me to cut other people grammatical slack. When someone sends me an email or a blog comment with a grammatical error or word misspelled, I don’t get out my red pen. Sometimes I find it endearing.
-As a person with dyscalculia (a spatial learning disability), I have been traumatized in the past by trying to follow practices that hint at anything with choreographed steps, preferring instead impromptu movement, freestyle dancing, and not balancing my checkbook. Also, since my husband does a few kinds of marital arts, practices more than one meditation tradition, and is engaged in a growing number of therapeutic modalities related to his counseling practice, I find that I have swung to the opposite end of the spectrum, becoming somewhat of a hooky-playing rebel skeptic in balance to him.
-I’m so directional dyslexic (aka dyscalculic) that when I’m getting around places I don’t know, I grab on to Joe and let him lead the way. I recently referred to him as my “seeing eye dog.”
-A dyscalculia poem not written by me: I can’t write Haikus / I have dyscalculia / But I hope this worked – Ravyn LaRue
