When I was a child, I remember one night my dad kept drawing clocks over and over for me until I finally learned to tell time a little.
As a reward he took me out for ice cream at ten o’clock on a school night.
Dad, a former airplane mechanic in the Air Force and a computer tech after my parents’ divorce, was a math whiz and ahead of his time when it came to tech stuff, always building something in his workshop in the basement.
I, on the other hand, always struggled with numbers and can barely add and subtract to this day. I can’t read a map or tell you how long it takes to walk a certain number of miles, among other mathematic tasks. Lots of kids struggle with math and some adults will joke that they’re not good at it but dyscalculia is a specific learning disorder that affects how children learn and understand it. There’s much less research about it than there is dyslexia.
In high school I barely graduated due to poor comprehension and at one point, a math teacher who had taken me under her wing reported that I would take my glasses off and on in frustration as I tried to solve each problem, getting more and more agitated. Further on in high school I could never get beyond basic numbers to continue to calculus or algebra like my classmates. I hated making outlines because it involved Roman numerals which I could not tackle.
It wasn’t until college I was diagnosed with dyscalculia, a math learning disability that severely affected my life to the point that it caused me much distress and social anxiety when confronted with math figures. The disorder affects things like managing time, figuring distance, judging speed, recognizing patterns, mental computation, and counting on fingers long after your peers have stopped. You also avoid games involving math or strategy and you can’t problem solve. The result often leads to anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem.
Dyscalculia is defined as consistent failure to achieve in math relevant to age, instruction, intelligence and effort.
It tends to be genetic, but it also can be the result of a brain injury, the latter of which can be worked on through using various tools over a period. There could be one core deficit in the brain that underlies the learning disability or there could be several, according to research.
I remember my college counselor saying, “I don’t know how you can be so good with words and so bad at math.”
At the time I was editor of the campus paper and co-editor of the school magazine.
Unfortunately, dyscalculia is often misdiagnosed as “just being bad at math.”
It took me three times to pass non-credit remedial math in college and even then, only by the skin of my teeth. The pass/fail scale for that class was a C or below. If you earned a C, you passed which just stressed me out more to the point that I wrote a poem about it. The teacher and my counselor figured out through trial and error that if they wrote each math problem on a separate page it was easier for me to do. Seeing all the work on one sheet baffled me and I would look ahead to all the equations in a panic, knowing I wouldn’t be able to work them.
Visual aids are helpful for those with dyscalculia.
When I was a pet sitter, I used to have to call my daughter’s father who’s brilliant with numbers and words to help me do invoices for my private clients so I wouldn’t under or over charge them. They never knew. Before that I got ripped off many times, unbeknownst to me. I also got taken advantage of financially by employers and some friends as well as a few co-workers.
I had to quit the last two jobs I had because of dyscalculia and others before that, or I would get fired. I can’t take any positions that require counting back change or figuring out tips and on the flip side I never know how much to tip others, so I must look it up.
I remember taking certain positions not thinking there would be any math involved and when there was, I was dumbfounded. I just learned that if you have trouble learning athletic moves or dance steps, which I always have fought with, that is related to dyscalculia.
As others didn’t relate to me with my arithmetic struggle, neither did I understand dyslexia as I was an avid reader since childhood, having won a reading contest in the first grade. The ideal age to diagnose dyscalculia is between six and eight years old.
For more information go to dyscalculia.org or dyscalculianetwork.com.