Dyscalculia

How many people have you heard ever say 'oh I have number dyslexia'? I bet there are a few people. Guess what? It's its own thing. It is called dyscalculia, I know it kind of sounds like Dracula, but trust me it's not a vampire related learning disability. If you haven't put a face to this learning disability yet, I have dyscalculia.

I have struggled with math all my life. This is not an exaggeration, I really have. In high school I understood the processes and what to do to solve problems, but on tests and homework I would do all the right work, but my answer would be wrong. I know many of you are saying 'Well there are lots of kids who do that' but do they transpose numbers much like someone who has dyslexia would transpose letters? Do decimal places come and go? Do negative signs pop up and disappear in places they shouldn't? I was often told to double check my work. I would solve the same problem the same exact way six different times and end up with six different answers. I was also told to work slower, but no matter how fast or slow I worked it didn't matter. I could retake tests multiple times, but still nothing really helped. My teacher in high school once told me, 'Melissa, your work is all correct, you're doing it right, it's just the answer that you're having the problem with. I don't understand it'.

I passed math well enough to graduate and go to college and I took my last math class, and struggled once again through chemistry (this can be a story in and of itself so I'll spare you the painful details of my college chemistry experience). In my freshman year in college I took a work study position basically pushing papers around in the Disability Centers office. I said something once to my boss that I hated math and she asked me why and I told her, in jest, that I had number dyslexia. She told me that I should look up dyscalculia because it was a thing that I should develop strategies for if I hadn't already.

Reading the symptoms was like reading a book about my life and math. What kills me is that nobody really knows about it beyond a handful of people. Teachers now still don't know what to look for and how to recognize it. Kids all the time are slipping through the cracks. Apparently the national average of students who have dyscalculia is 1% over half of those students were previously diagnosed with ADHD. I feel that this number is much too low and the reason is because nobody knows that it's a thing to look for and document. Or if they do know to look for it's because the student is already having trouble.

So the reason why I wrote about having dyscalculia is because nobody knows about it. So, now my blog readers, you know. It's a thing.