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Do I have a learning disabilty?

Eddie Dane

Philosopher
Eddie Dane
Joined
Aug 18, 2007
Messages
6,681
I've never been able to wrap my mind around calculations.

I see myself as reasonably intelligent and get through life with some success.

But let's face it: I cannot do even the most basic calculations. To the point that I have to consider myself incredibly lucky to be living in an age with computers and calculators.

In school I had a narrow escape: the year after I graduated, math was made mandatory. I got to choose subjects like languages and history.

Like illiterate people I have all kinds of little strategies to hide my inability to make simple calculations. I suspect people would really lose respect for me if they knew.

I've had remedial teaching as a kid, it just never worked out for me.

So does anybody know if this is common and what is usually thought to cause it?
 
It may be, but then it may be that the way you were taught math was not compatible with your personal style as well. It usually takes tests to determine.
DSM IV thinking:
The mathematics ability of individuals suffering from this Learning Disorder measures lower than their expected potential.

Diagnostic criteria for 315.1 Mathematics Disorder


(cautionary statement) (not linked to)
A. Mathematical ability, as measured by individually administered standardized tests, is substantially below that expected given the person's chronological age, measured intelligence, and age-appropriate education.

B. The disturbance in Criterion A significantly interferes with academic achievement or activities of daily living that require mathematical ability.

C. If a sensory deficit is present, the difficulties in mathematical ability are in excess of those usually associated with it.
Click to expand...
Now here is one key for a learning disorder:

Ability to perform is below that expected, especially by an overall measure of ability. So without talking to someone who does assessments, it is very hard to say other than that. If your ability to perform at math tasks is well below that of your general IQ and skills, then yes you would by definition have a math learning disorder.

But if it is because your were never taught math properly, than no. If it is because you have an anxiety related disorder about math then maybe, maybe not.

Then there is always the criteria portion: "significantly interferes ". What is clinically significantly interferes is a high standard.

This is also the cautionary statement from the web page where I got the information:
http://www.behavenet.com/capsules/disorders/cautionary.htm


The specified diagnostic criteria for each mental disorder are offered as guidelines for making diagnoses, because it has been demonstrated that the use of such criteria enhances agreement among clinicians and investigators. The proper use of these criteria requires specialized clinical training that provides both a body of knowledge and clinical skills.
Click to expand...


And as a side note dyslexia can mess with math as well, especially if you have the letter reversal thing.

I am someone who has severe dyslexia, both kinds, but due to a family that had no other options, I learned to read. I basically had to memories all the words and I read for along time by the shape of the words along with the letters at the beginning and end. It was not until after I graduated from college and was in my 30s that a friend asked some simple questions, and bam I was diagnosed. (He has a clinical PHD in psych.)

And personally while I have a math brain, and did very well in math classes, I hate arithmetic and find it to be a real hurdle.
 
I've always been excellent at doing complicated computer programming, but had trouble with simple calculations. That's why I never kept score at bowling, and someone else handles the garage sales receipts.
 
Dancing David said:
It may be, but then it may be that the way you were taught math was not compatible with your personal style as well. It usually takes tests to determine.
Click to expand...

I agree with this. So much math instruction is done according to what is easiest for the teacher, and the school system, not what are the best and/or easiest ways for the students to learn. John Holt talked about better ways of teaching math in his book How Children Fail.
 
Self diagnosis, and worse, diagnosis via internet forum, is rarely a good choice. If you are essentially functionally illiterate in mathematics, and you would like to find out if help is available, you would be well served to contact a specialist in learning disabilities. Odds are good that if you can't find one easily, a local university's office for students with special needs would be able to direct you to one. They would need to actually test you before telling you whether you have a problem or not. (It does seem likely that you do, honestly, but a long distance diagnosis is sketchy at best...)

Edit: The reason for contacting a university as opposed to a high school is that they likely have access to individuals used to dealing with learning disabilities in adults rather than children.
 
I used to teach undergraduate mathematics. I had a few students who worked very hard at understanding basic algebra and simply could not pass my course. They weren't dumb. I've had a few dumb students who I just thought really weren't up to college level work, but that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about intelligent adults who were earnestly trying to learn because math as it was a requirement. They didn't get to graduate until they had passed a math course. Adults who put in two or three times the time and effort of the typical student and just could not do the work.

I don't know if it's formally identified as a learning disability. I did refer them to a professor in the psychology department who specialized in math anxiety. That would sometimes help in coping with the course.

I even had one woman who was taking it for the third time, saw me in my office every week, etc. I think she managed to score the bare minimum on the department final and I went ahead and passed her so she could graduate. But I probably shouldn't have.

Some people just don't get math the way I don't get rap music.
 
Eddie Dane said:
I've never been able to wrap my mind around calculations.

I see myself as reasonably intelligent and get through life with some success.

But let's face it: I cannot do even the most basic calculations. To the point that I have to consider myself incredibly lucky to be living in an age with computers and calculators.

In school I had a narrow escape: the year after I graduated, math was made mandatory. I got to choose subjects like languages and history.

Like illiterate people I have all kinds of little strategies to hide my inability to make simple calculations. I suspect people would really lose respect for me if they knew.

I've had remedial teaching as a kid, it just never worked out for me.

So does anybody know if this is common and what is usually thought to cause it?
Click to expand...

For me it is calculus, although I understand the principles I have never been able to just sit down and do some problems. I have no problems with algebra and trigonometry but for some reason calculus just doesn’t come as easily for me. Curious though that I have spent most of my career in engineering, but fortunately I started after slide rules and could usually work out whatever equations I needed with just algebra, trigonometry or using a spread sheet to do or graph an iteration. Also computers and finite element analysis were becoming standard fair so they would do most of the number crunching for you and you just had to do some testing to confirm the accuracy of the model. I have meant for some time to just sit down a work through some problems particularly in tensor calculus, but just never seem to stick with it. Perhaps I just need to take a course and the structured environment will get me over that hump.
 
I have a friend who has been diagnosed with and is eligible for "special needs" assistance because of her dyscalculia. It does significantly affect her ability to learn, as well as her day-to-day functionality. She has absolutely no concept whether 5 is bigger than, or less than, 5,000. (But she can tell if five somethings are more than 5,000 somethings, but she has to see the two piles of somethings to tell. She can't tell at a glance if a stack of bricks has a dozen or a hundred, or which stack might be closer to which number.)

Personally, because I'm not afflicted with it, I don't really understand it, and in her case, she's just given up. She says, "I can't do numbers," and she doesn't even try. Which is something else I don't understand. (I don't like being confused. If something confuses me, I really work at understanding it.)

Another friend with an advanced degree in learning disabilities says that transparent colored sheets laid over the worksheet can help with some types of number recognition problems, such as transposition of numbers, or seeing them backward (or even upside down), just as it does in dyslexia, but different people respond to different colors, so the red sheet might be more successful than the blue or the green sheet for a specific individual.

I agree that if it's getting in the way of life, a university might be a good place to go, because the resources are more prevalent there.
 
HawaiiBigSis said:
I have a friend who has been diagnosed with and is eligible for "special needs" assistance because of her dyscalculia. It does significantly affect her ability to learn, as well as her day-to-day functionality. She has absolutely no concept whether 5 is bigger than, or less than, 5,000. (But she can tell if five somethings are more than 5,000 somethings, but she has to see the two piles of somethings to tell. She can't tell at a glance if a stack of bricks has a dozen or a hundred, or which stack might be closer to which number.)
Click to expand...
This sounds vaguely like the child of someone else on the forum, who has been diagnosed with some sort of one-to-one correspondence disability. If you throw a small pile of coins on a table (say, 3--7 coins), can your friend instantly tell you how many are there?

~~ Paul
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
This sounds vaguely like the child of someone else on the forum, who has been diagnosed with some sort of one-to-one correspondence disability. If you throw a small pile of coins on a table (say, 3--7 coins), can your friend instantly tell you how many are there?

~~ Paul
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I don't know. She now lives far, far away from me, but if I remember, I'll ask her next time we're talking about it.
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
Eddie, do you have trouble with simple calculations, or are you talking about algebra?

~~ Paul
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I'm talking simple calculations.

I mean that when I buy something at a store with cash, I let the clerk do the calculating and look like I'm too. But I'm actually acting like I am.

I can do the essential money changing calculations, but I'm ridiculously slow at it and I have to re-do it at least once. Just to make sure I get the same result.

I would actually like to try my hand at sales, but I avoid any situation that exposes me as functionally illiterate at calculating.

Give me an excel sheet, and I'm fine.
I make budgets and I buy goods and services in my job.

I'm thinking in two directions at the moment:
On the one hand I could have another go at braeking through this mental barrier through remedial teaching. I'm 38 years old.
Or I could just go to meetings with a laptop and openly say that I have a form of dyslexia that requires me to calculate with a computer.

Recently I was inspired by an African client of ours: This guy has a number of retail outlets in his home country and a company that installs and maintains elevators. The guy is illiterate. As in cannot read or write.

He just takes his assistant to all meetings to handle the paper work.

The key being: he was completely unashamed about it.
 
BTW

Thanks for all the good answers so far.

I take forum advice with a grain of salt, for obvious reasons.
So I might go and find an expert at uni as someone here suggested.

But it's cool to get some informed opinions as a starting point.
 
My brain just dies when it comes to numbers. It's really weird. I know 50 + 25 = 75, but if you told me to do add up 76 + 23, I'll have to really think about it. My brain will think, well OK, I have 76, now where do I start adding the 23 on to the 76? Does the first digit of the 23 over lap the 76th number, or is another seperate number? I know I know, it sounds sooo stupid, but it confuses the hell out of me. It's even worse when I subtract. I can manage some multiplication, but very little. I can't divide at all either. When it comes to anything more advanced forget it.

At least I can do enough to count money, but numbers just confuse me.
 
ConkerTheSquirrel said:
My brain just dies when it comes to numbers. It's really weird. I know 50 + 25 = 75, but if you told me to do add up 76 + 23, I'll have to really think about it. My brain will think, well OK, I have 76, now where do I start adding the 23 on to the 76? Does the first digit of the 23 over lap the 76th number, or is another seperate number? I know I know, it sounds sooo stupid, but it confuses the hell out of me. It's even worse when I subtract. I can manage some multiplication, but very little. I can't divide at all either. When it comes to anything more advanced forget it.

At least I can do enough to count money, but numbers just confuse me.
Click to expand...

Would you have any problems with 6 + 3 or 7 + 2? If not, you just have to ad each digit individually.

Also, when you have larger numbers, it's easier to do a bunch of simpler operations than only one. For example, 543 - 359 would become:

(550 - 350) + (-7 - 9) = 200 - 16 = 184

or

543 - 300 - 59 = 243 - 59 = 243 - 9 - 50 = 234 - 50 = 184
 
ConkerTheSquirrel said:
My brain just dies when it comes to numbers. It's really weird. I know 50 + 25 = 75, but if you told me to do add up 76 + 23, I'll have to really think about it. My brain will think, well OK, I have 76, now where do I start adding the 23 on to the 76? Does the first digit of the 23 over lap the 76th number, or is another seperate number? I know I know, it sounds sooo stupid, but it confuses the hell out of me. It's even worse when I subtract. I can manage some multiplication, but very little. I can't divide at all either. When it comes to anything more advanced forget it.

At least I can do enough to count money, but numbers just confuse me.
Click to expand...

This describes roughly how I experience it.

23+76? Here's how I'd approach the problem: I can do 25+75 so I do that instead and make "corrections" later. So I've done 25+75 but I subtract 2 because it should have been 23. That makes, eh, 98. But the 75 should have been 76, I have to add a one. So, that makes 99. Except I don't do that last step because I've forgotten the number I'd arrived at anyway. As I try to retrieve it, I forget how much I was supposed to add. and I give up.

This is the thought pattern that I have. Nothing intuitive. And under time pressure I get confused halfway and get it wrong.
 
Rairun said:
Would you have any problems with 6 + 3 or 7 + 2? If not, you just have to ad each digit individually.

Also, when you have larger numbers, it's easier to do a bunch of simpler operations than only one. For example, 543 - 359 would become:

(550 - 350) + (-7 - 9) = 200 - 16 = 184

or

543 - 300 - 59 = 243 - 59 = 243 - 9 - 50 = 234 - 50 = 184
Click to expand...

You see, that was like reading Japanese to me.

I can do small digits, but I have to think about it. A lot of my equations are done from memory..

For some odd reason, I know 100 + 100 = 200. There 2 of each 100, so it makes sense that there's 200. But when it comes to odd numbers, and I don't know why my brain does this because it sounds ridiculous, my brain automatically wonders if they add up the same as what even numbers do.

I know that sounds so stupid, and makes zero sense, but it's kinda like my brain won't recognise the logic of mathmatics.
 
Eddie Dane said:
This describes roughly how I experience it.

23+76? Here's how I'd approach the problem: I can do 25+75 so I do that instead and make "corrections" later. So I've done 25+75 but I subtract 2 because it should have been 23. That makes, eh, 98. But the 75 should have been 76, I have to add a one. So, that makes 99. Except I don't do that last step because I've forgotten the number I'd arrived at anyway. As I try to retrieve it, I forget how much I was supposed to add. and I give up.

This is the thought pattern that I have. Nothing intuitive. And under time pressure I get confused halfway and get it wrong.
Click to expand...

Yes, it feels completely unintuitive.

This is how I would tackle 76 + 23.

76 + 20 = 96 + 3 = 99

Stupid and illogical, but if I try it any other way, my brain won't accept it.

It's funny because everyone I know thinks I'm really intelligent. I'm not. I think it's because I take an interest in science, space exploration, mental illnesses, and in debunking. These are subjects I can talk about, maybe not as well as most of the guys on here, but better than most.

Everything feels like a giant mess in my head in reality.
 
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ConkerTheSquirrel said:
You see, that was like reading Japanese to me.

I can do small digits, but I have to think about it. A lot of my equations are done from memory...

For some odd reason, I know 100 + 100 = 200. There 2 of each 100, so it makes sense that there's 200. But when it comes to odd numbers, and I don't know why my brain does this because it sounds ridiculous, my brain automatically wonders if they add up the same as what even numbers do.

I know that sounds so stupid, and makes zero sense, but it's kinda like my brain won't recognise the logic of mathmatics.
Click to expand...

Or it does math differently.

What you say makes perfect sense to me, as i stated I memorised the spelling of words and use a combination of shapes and letter combination to read. I know force myself to read a word letter by letter the first time I enounter it. Otherwise (especially names) long letter strings become something like Joh****berg for Johanesberg or Ope****mer for Openheimer.

I could read very , very ,very slowly but spelling was real pain and very frustrating. Even with memorisinf is till transpose letters like ie all the time,
 
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