When Numbers Don’t Make Sense: Life with Dyscalculia

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A lifesaver, if you can figure out what operation to do.
A lifesaver, if you can figure out what operation to do.

Go back to third grade. You remember those multiplication drills, right? Timed: 100 problems in 10 minutes. Then 7 minutes. Then 4 minutes. Rows of ten, front and back, purple print still smelling of ditto ink. You are seven years old and the numbers swim before your eyes. They don’t mean anything; they have lost the sense of addition or even subtraction.

You chew the end of your pencil. One missed question will mean no recess. You have hours of tutoring. Hours of homework. You work and work and work and you know that today you will hear your teacher sneer, again, “Nice day outside today, isn’t it? Wouldn’t it be nice to play outside? Maybe if you just tried harder. Why don’t you just try?”

You do try. No one believes how hard you try.

And still you can’t do it.

Lots of people have math phobias – maybe you break into sweat when you have to solve for x, or cringe at the thought of computing square footage. But for some people, math isn’t just hard. For people like my husband Chris, numbers just don’t make sense. He’s the seven-year-old in the story above – and he has dyscalculia. He’s a dissertation short of a Ph.D. in literature. He can read French near-fluency, identify extinct shark species on the basis of one tooth, discourse on dinosaur genuses and pick apart the differences between Linnean classification and cladistics. But still, at times, he has to count on his fingers.

You’ve heard of dyslexia, a learning disability that makes reading difficult or impossible. Dyscalculia does much the same for math. Unlike dyslexia, dyscalculia is wildly under-studied and poorly understood, though it seems to be mostly heritable. It affects as many girls as it does boys. In fact, a full 3 to 6% of the school-age population suffer from it – and it many cases, it goes undiagnosed. My husband didn’t realize he had a named learning disability until college.

Chris’s voice still shakes with anger when he talks about math class in elementary school. He failed it – over and over and over. He finally passed multiplication through sheer memorization, months of missed recess, and lots of tears. But his difficulties continued. One year, an amazing teacher helped him earn a B. He hugged her with joy.

At the time, no one knew anything was wrong; teachers and parents insisted this A student just needed to try harder. Dyscalculia destroyed his aspirations of becoming a biologist; in high school, he successfully put fish into suspended animation and corresponded with experts on extinct whales. But he could not pass higher math. Now he’s an English teacher – and a good one. His job, mercifully, does not require multiplication.

But dyscalculia affects him in other ways. I have learned never to ask him how much time has passed or how long something will take; years of frustration taught me that my husband’s disability prevents him from accurately gauging the passage of time. Clocks are a nightmare – we keep analogue ones for show; he tells time with the digital display on his phone.

He cannot estimate how much gas is left, or whether the 16 or 10 ounce box of oatmeal is cheaper. Balancing a checkbook is out of the question. I have to compute medication doses. And while technology has made a lot of things simpler – he especially uses the calculator on his iphone – it’s hard for him to get places on time, or estimate how long it’ll take to drive from Forest Acres to West Columbia.

We do a lot counting currency in our house.
We do a lot counting currency in our house.

This has changed not only the way we live, but also the way we talk about math to our sons. We’re hyper-alert for difficulty. I make a point to talk about numbers as much as I can: “Look, we have three apples. I need three more apples to make six, which is half a dozen.” I try to help my oldest learn his fractions; we play with coins a lot. Baking is an exercise in math: find the one-and-a-half cup mark. One stick of butter is eight tablespoons. Two halves is a whole; three thirds makes one. We count by fives and tens and hundreds.

And we try not to let daddy’s trouble affect how they view numbers. Math might be hard for dad, but it might not be hard for them. Though if it is, we’ll get them help as soon as possible. They will never be told to just try harder.

Think you or someone you love may suffer from undiagnosed dyscalulia? Check out a formal list of symptoms from the National Association for Learning Disabilities, or take a quiz at www.dyscalculia.org. If your child suffers from dyscalulia, he or she is eligible for an Individualized Education Plan that may include extra help, longer time to take tests, and in-school therapy paid for by your local school district. Check with your child’s guidance office for more information.

 

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Elizabeth
In 2009, Elizabeth got pregnant and quit a Ph.D. program in English, where she taught writing and served as an Assistant Director of First-Year English. Now she stays home with her three boys in a house full of art and learning and books and dogs and fossils. An amateur naturalist, paleontologist, and artist of all kinds, she unschools her four-year-old and serves as a Volunteer Babywearing Educator with the local chapter of Babywearing International. Her MFA in fiction gets put to use writing blog posts and that novel she’ll finish once her boys stop interrupting her. Elizabeth has won numerous writing awards for her short stories, novellas, and novel-in-progress, and blogs at www.manicpixiedreammama.com.

2 COMMENTS

  1. dyscalculia robbed me totally of a life..robbed me of my dreams..I tried so hard in school but that was a long time ago. o one ever heard of dyscalculia. I was 40 years old when diagnosed. but by then it was too late.

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