Well That Sucks, Thanks for the Memories
(Bonus points if you can name the anime from whose blooper reel I got the title of this post. No really - it became a part of my personal meme lexicon in the early 2000s from an anime dub blooper reel, and for the life of me I cannot remember which anime it was. Now that we've gotten the depths of my sad nerdery out of the way, let us talk about how much I suck at math.)
Like everyone else in a US high school the last week before break, I did not do much actual work the last week before break. I handed out a lot of candy canes and shelved a few books. I made a to-do list of projects that are Next Year Me's Problem. And I Googled "dyscalculia."
This isn't the first time I've looked up "dyscalculia," but it was the first time I did so on a mission: to do anything at all other than throw my hands up and go "welp, brain broken, too bad no numbers for me."
So I started looking at books and articles on dyscalculia. I read about how to build adaptation skills in kids that have it and how adults can adapt to it too. I learned that not everyone with math anxiety has dyscalculia, but everyone with dyscalculia has math anxiety.
And I learned that, with or without a numbers learning disorder, the way I was taught arithmetic was probably the worst possible approach offered in the entire previous century.
Let me back up.
The current "gold standard" for teaching math to kids is the CPA approach. It stands for Concrete, Pictorial, Abstract - the sequence by which new ideas are introduced. (It's also called the CRA approach, for Concrete - Representational - Abstract.)
Teaching a kid how to count to 10? Hand them 10 of something. Have them move the pieces around, line them up, make groups. Eventually, add pictures of groups of things (apples, kites, washed-up baseball players). Later, add the number symbols we all know and love (in the US, 1, 2, 3, and the rest of the squad).
This is the cornerstone of the Singapore method, which consistently lands Singapore's students in the top math scorers worldwide - by a lot.
Above all, this method stresses, do not withdraw concrete and pictorial representations too soon. We're hard-wired as a species to like concrete counting methods. We have ten fingers, and we use them for more than picking our noses!
Flashback to my first grade classroom.
My first grade classroom had four or five abacuses - the kind with the rainbow beads on horizontal strings. Being a child whose favorite color was "rainbow," I loved these things. I would choose them over toys during playtime.
I was not allowed to use them for math lessons.
Why? Because the abacuses were reserved "for the slower kids" (my teacher's exact words). I was "very bright"; I "just needed to apply myself."
(As a multiply-neurodivergent adult who wasn't diagnosed with any of it until adulthood and as someone who works with high schoolers every day, let me just say: the phrase "you're smart, you just need to apply yourself" should be a one-way ticket to a full LD screening. #justeducatoropinions)
I had math anxiety by the end of first grade. Because "applying myself," whatever that meant, didn't bridge that gap between the concrete and the abstract. Numbers were weird alien symbols I could decode only occasionally. Sometimes they just wouldn't talk to me. I couldn't explain why. (I was six!)
Learning at age 42 that I was systematically deprived of the tools required to succeed in math from the age of 6 is doing a number on me. On that first day, I had to take a fast three laps around the high school track to calm down before my lunch break ended.
When I got back to my desk, I of course went looking for better textbook options.
I find the artwork the Maths - No Problem! series, part of the UK National Curriculum, weirdly soothing. It's cute and friendly. And the fact that every single lesson is modeled with little cubes reassures me that no one is going to make me rely solely on those devious little "digits" until I'm good and ready.
The series is also available for free on the Internet Archive. Since I'm not looking for the best books so much as something better than I had as a kid, I've decided to start here. With Book 1A.
Let's see what happens.
Further reading:
What is the Concrete Representationa Abstract (CRA) Approach and How to Use It In Your Elementary Math Classroom
What is Singapore Math?
Singapore Math (Wikipedia)
Maths - No Problem! Textbook 1A (Internet Archive)