#math dyslexia

[maths-screaming]

Commence the Screaming

This is a blog about innumeracy.

Innumeracy is like illiteracy, but for numbers. I have dyscalculia - or "math dyslexia," if you prefer something easier to say that more people also understand.

Like most people with dyscalculia, I've had it my whole life. I've also been functionally innumerate my whole life. I can count (usually); I can do basic addition and multiplication (kind of), subtraction (sometimes) and division (ehhh....). I hate games that involve counting money or keeping score. I can read an analog clock if you make me. I mix up my right and left more than random chance allows. I get lost a lot.

My math skills top out at "calculate a 20% tip on this bill" or "count change." I can't even reliably use a calculator for a lot of things, because calculators need the user to know what they're trying to get the calculator to calculate, and I can't always tell the thing the steps in the right order.

I'm 42, and for 42 years, I've hated, avoided, and feared basic math. I have three college degrees - not one requiring a single math course. I'm fascinated by several topics involving math, but I can't do them. The numbers knock me out of contention every time.

So why - now, when I have my own house, a stable job that requires only the occasional calculator arithmetic, a reliable car, and something resembling a savings account - do I care to change that?

Honestly...I don't know. There are certainly a few factors in play, including:

Most of my friends are math nerds, science nerds, and/or spatial-reasoning-artist nerds, and I want to appreciate their nerdery appropriately;

My students are aware that I'm a giant nerd who is interested in everything and thus love to ask me questions, and it hurts to admit to 15 year olds that I'm better at ancient Greek than at basic algebra;

I read Ben Orlin's Math With Bad Drawings and I want to be able to do the math, dang it. (I can already do bad drawings.)

But the biggest one is this:

Having learned what it is like to spend 40 years of one's life hating and fearing math, I don't want to spend another 40 years of my life hating and fearing math.

So...here we go. Middle-aged librarian tries to get slightly less bad with the numbers. Much screaming ensues. Ask me anything.

[snotrockett]

no you don’t understand how bad at math i am. i genuinely think i could decipher the zodiac killers letter faster than i could do whatever i saw my friend doing in calculus 2

[youronlyirlmswvenable]

Just an exurpt of me talking to my mom about my upcoming mortuary law exam and yelling to her about how I understand law better than math and I shoulda just gone and be a lawyer that works specifically with mortuary law decisions...

For context my mother is a juvenile probation officer, and has worked for the judicial branch since I was 4. Im 24 now so... yeah that’s prob another way my mom fucked me up

Putting the fear of God, the Law, P*lice, and the like to where I never did anything remotely illegal despite being friends with the social outcasts and drug addicts.

Literally my life. Guess that’s why I’m so #cool I’m illiterate in math but fuckin genius with mortuary law and law in general BECAUSE MY MOM FUCKED MY HEAD AND THEN MY DUMB ADHD RIDDLED BRAIN WAS LIKE YOU KNOW WHATS GOOD?! HYPERFIXATING ON DEATH AND HOW SOCIETY DEALS WITH DEATH AS WELL AS MENTAL ILLNESS SUBSEQUENTLY HAVING ME KNOW THE FULL HISTORY OF SHIT.

It’s weird to tell people that I have math dyslexia (discalcula) from a young age in elementary school I had trouble counting back from 30, even in French. But I was reading fucking everything. It’s hard because I didn’t notice I fully had it until around middle school when algebra was brought in and I went... those numbers now look like different numbers and the letters adding to it confuse me into think that the numbers should be letters but the numbers are numbers but flipped or mistaking for something else entirely and I can’t solve a fuckin problem and yet here I am in Thanos chemistry and embalming praying to Anubis, and Hela that I’ll understand this shit as well as Odin and Saga.

[mental--musings]

Being dyslexic in math

X+y=z slope and all that shit I was like hmmmmmm is this

The language of the fleas wtf is this Idk these numbers and how to solve a thing

Half the time in math I failed because I could not calculate numbers in my head I just couldnt grasp the image of numbers it never made enough sense to me so I never made it past basic algebra and algebra 2...

[fabulous-by-choice]

Andi Mack. Learning Disability Visibility.

TJ struggling with math dyslexia is great representation for kids in school.

[mangrovesaltswamp]

it’s not simply: oh well I can’t answer math questions but when would that ever actually come up in real life

no, it’s actually: I can’t memorize my own phone number, or s-security number, or the dates I’ve started working anywhere or the names of past bosses or recommendation sources I might need, or my girlfriend’s own birthday, I can’t even count the spaces from April until now in September without needing to re-count it on my fingers seven times before I come up with an answer

[maths-screaming]

Something Very Weird Just Happened to Me, Fam

I was doing some subtraction problems (no beans this time), and I encountered 35-28.

And my brain went "aren't those just 7s*?"

So I did 5-4, which is 1. 1x7 is 7. Also the answer.

I would have chalked this up to random chance on a randomized worksheet (mathisfun.com), but then the worksheet gave me a second example: 49-21. And then 35-21.

So I did the same thing with the multiples of 7. And checked my work. And I started to spot a pattern:

Multiples of 7, subtracted from one another, result in the multiple of 7 that's the difference of the ones that got subtracted.**

Is...is this what they mean by "number sense"? Did I grow some number sense? Why do the numbers make sense??

WHAT IS HAPPENINNNG

AND WHY IS IT THE NERDIEST COOL THING I HAVE SEEN SINCE END OF EVANGELION

* we were not taught to use the multiplication table in elementary, but we were drilled via flashcards until we knew everything through 9x9 cold. The result is that I can pull any of those out of my head, but I cannot just recite any list of them.***

**I am aware I explained that badly and also that there's probably a way to express that in algebraic notation. I'll get there. Ya girl just realized 7x5 minus 7x3 equals 7x2 for the first time in 40 years, lol.

***Except the threes, because I saw Schoolhouse Rock.

[maths-screaming]

"Check Your Work"

All my elementary teachers wrote the same thing on my report cards:

"Makes careless mistakes because she does not check her work."

I could write a book about how having undiagnosed, untreated ADHD was the primary problem here. But I'll skip that for now.

Instead, I want to talk about a secondary problem with "does not check her work."

To do it, let's look at this example from a few posts ago:

Here, I made the mistake of adding the tens instead of subtracting them, which temporarily gave me "84" instead of the correct answer, "4." I caught it when I started a number line to check that 43 is 4 away from 39 and realized that there was no way I'd need to write out 80+ numbers to figure that out.

At the time, I wrote: I guarantee you that 7 year old me would not have caught that mistake, because 7 year old me would have been expected not to do something as concrete as a number line to check their work.

Here's what I want to talk about:

I'm not sure what 7 year old me was expected to do to "check their work."

I didn't know then, and I don't know now. I think we were supposed to look at our work and find obvious mistakes? Like, I was supposed to look at 43 - 39 and say to myself "wow, that cannot possibly be 80something"? I guess?

But were were never given any strategies to do that.

I'm new to the "counting on" number-line approach; we were never shown how to do those. We weren't even told "add the answer to the bottom number to get the top one" until middle school. I know, because I vividly remember that being a revelation to me. You can just add the numbers back together to get the number? Why did no one tell me this??

So when told to "check my work," I didn't, because I didn't know how. I couldn't tell from looking at it when it was wrong; I needed concrete alternative "proofs," which I was never taught to do. I lacked the number sense to figure them out myself. And, at age 7, I lacked the self-awareness to say "what do you mean by check your work, because I have no idea how to do that."

(I also grew up in an era, and with parents, that would have seen "what do you mean? I don't get it" as impermissible "backtalk," worthy of a "go to your room without dinner." But that is yet another entire book.)

Again, I'm pretty sure non-dyscalculic kids can look at 43 - 39 and say "that can't be 80something if you subtracted." Non-dyscalculic kids can probably also say "I checked by counting and 43 is 4 away from 39." An expert would likely read this post and say "yeah, you have weak number sense."

The problem is that at age 7, there was no way for me to know my number sense wasn't on par with my peers'. And no one with the knowledge or perspective to deduce that fact appears to have done so. So I kept on "making careless mistakes because she does not check her work."