Dyscalculia

Post Reply New Topic

I know this may not be the best question, but how many of you suffer or have suffered from dyscalculia? I go through jokes and criticism and it's letting me down even further. If anyone can help it would be good...

I care more about social performance than I do maths, so if anyone criticises me about my poor maths abilities I just laugh in agreement - where as if someone criticises a social quirk of mine I feel all self-loathing and depressed.

But anyway, everybody's got a weakness. You must be good at other things. Are you good at art, or writing, or anything else that's not related to maths? I don't mean savant, I just mean good or average. Whenever I show how poor I am at maths, I do remind people that I am very good with spelling, punctuation and grammar.

Yes, I have other skills, but that also makes me distressed. Some of my colleagues think that just because I have knowledge in various areas, I also know mathematics. I can even explain epistemologically and that broke the doubt of people who also have difficulties. But here in my country it seems that failure is used in multiple ways. You can't correct yourself, you have to be a failure, to know more about others is an offense, so it gives me a dismay.

Luckily so many others are SOOOOO bad, and I learned several tricks, and habits and practice helped, so it isn't so bad now, but I do have a problem with reading in any sense of imagery I have, and that hurt my ability to do things in a more traditional way. I think that maybe this is the ONE case where people around me had some visualization they were using that I could not.

Of course, ironically, at this point a lot of those that are SO bad can use calculators. Calulators similar to what people today use, hit the market less than a decade before I graduated High School. ALSO, when they finally DID appear, they were FORBIDDEN to use on tests. ALSO, the first ones were VERY simple, IF YOU WERE LUCKY, they could do square root. Otherwise, it was only +-*/ and I believe they were only 8 digits.

I used to think I was stupid because the basic math stuff, and things like reading analog clocks, came so easily to everyone else, but I still have to do things like count on my fingers. Then I heard of dyscalculia, looked it up, and found that I have almost every symptom. I suspect my mom may have it, too, but not know about it.

I'm never sure whether dyscalculia is just difficulty with addition/subtraction/division and multipication , or more than that .

I was above average at that at school, and maybe also a bit above average at algebra . Geometry ? I'd have probably been in the 5th percentile on a good day .

My problem was more of an implementation problem, than one of not being able to do it, and I never counted on my fingers that I can recall, but yeah, I had the same problems. I had laid my life down by the time I was 4, and I KNEW what I had to do, and one thing was LEARN MATH!! !! ! Logically, you would figure it would be the EASIEST. IT WASN'T! And my mother told me my eighth grade teacher APOLOGIZED to her, because my 8th grade teacher was NEW and, basically INCOMPETENT! She LITERALLY just about SAID as much! I will NEVER forget her! She was from hawaii, and never let us forget it. She even had the class sing songs, etc... some of which were from hawaii.

Anyway, the industry changed, and I moved to a different part, so the need for complicated math was gone, but I can do a lot better with math now anyway.

With geometry, the guy FLUNKED me on the first couple tests because I didn't give any rules, etc.... And I was thinking WHY, IT IS SO OBVIOUS!! !! !! !! !! ! After I got used to doing that stupid stuff, I got 100% right on every test!

As for diyscalcula, my problem was with more complicated stuff. In retrospect, it is hard to explain. I don't have those kinds of problems anymore. NO THANKS TO THE SCHOOL SYSTEM THOUGH!! !! !! ! I really think they just DON'T CARE!

I have dyscalculia, along with ASD, ADHD, and GAD. I always got really high grades in school except for math. I just skimmed through math. I was able to get a degree in geoscience, because I love the non-math aspects of science. I actually saw a really funny and accurate sticker lately. It says "What do you call a scientist who can't do math? A geologist." It's so true Although, there are probably geologists who are really good at math. Just not me.

I've always had a really hard time with numbers. My worst subject in school. I was pretty convinced that I might have dyscalculia.
Lately, though, I've been doing 3d modelling for 3d printing, and I'm still pretty terrible with numbers, but I can see what some of what I failed to grasp in math classes actually pertains to. I feel like maybe if I had the right teacher guiding me through the relevant processes with some software in front of me I might be able to get it.
It would certainly make it easier to plot a things coordinates, anyway.
Still can't seem to keep numbers in my head for more than a few seconds at a time, though.

Also, I think there are some threads about discalculia in the Bipolar, Tourettes, Schizophrenia, and other Psychological Conditions subforum.
You might check that out.

A lot of math can be explained with pictures but I wasn't taught to do math that way.