Learning and Learning Disabilities/ Differences/ Styles/ Personalities, Plus Everything Else, Too
I keep making inroads into a large, complicated idea that I want to share here, and then getting overwhelmed by the scope of it. I think the pieces may wind up being a very long piece or even a book, but I want to get going and I want to involve the input and discussion of readers.
It concerns the area of my educational expertise, if I can be said to have one: so-called learning disabilities (LDs). This is complicated by the fact that the more I learn about LDs, the less I am certain that the way we describe them is the best way. I’ll explain as best I can over this series of articles.
So I’m going to dive in here with some important framing ideas that I will explain and clarify over the series.
1. Learning is not a uniform thing, and it is not automatic.
2. Schools are, in general, meant to teach the most people for the least money. This fact means that it does not work for all people. And it should.
Bear with me.
Lifelong Math Dummy
Let’s start with ME.
I take this same approach when I talk about LDs with my classes; it helps kids relax and hear me without feeling too personally vulnerable. It tends to engage their empathy and generosity, and if for some kids it decreases their confidence in me, and it can, that is always temporary, and I can take it. It’s where they’re at - not where they will be.
So: I have a solid and impactful “learning disability” that involves numbers. The term used generally is dyscalculia, although I didn’t hear that term until ten years after I started working in this field. I’ve never sought out a diagnosis, as I’ve figured out how to live with my limitations and built my life accordingly.
The list of things that can be involved with dyscalculia is pretty varied. In general, the descriptions of each kind of LD are varied - so you can recognize yourself in the list, but the list does not describe any one person. I have found it more useful in most circumstances to describe a learning personality than to ascribe specific labels (I will return to that idea often). So here’s me:
My own learning weirdness involves:
Certain crossed wires,
label attachment, and
numbers/computation.
The crossed wires - I am not sure they’re part of the same computation/labelling issue, but they feel related. In short, I cannot remember left and right in an automatic way, and never have. When I believe I have it correct, I am wrong 50% of the time, and that leaves me perpetually unsure and unready to guess. Even when I pause and check, using mnemonic devices like holding up L shapes with my fingers, I’m still incorrect half the time.
On-the-spot left and right situations are impossible for me, which you can imagine is problematic when driving (and dangerous on the highway). My partner knows to point, rather than use the terms.
Oddly, I have a solid sense of direction, and never make the labelling errors when I use the cardinal directions. I know which way to turn, and I nearly always call it the wrong thing.
The label attachment doesn’t seem inherently mathematical to me, but it is a consistently poorly functioning mental feature and does feel connected. I have no natural facility at connecting concepts, which I take in easily, with the words assigned to them.
In practice in school, this was manageable with practice and drilling. Where it messes me up is in fluid situations, like conversations and arguments. A lot of intelligent discussion involves short-handing ideas with, say, names of people or schools of thought - and I suck at this.
I easily understand and enjoy the gestalt, and am good at making connections between disparate ideas, but I feel like a dope. I’m either lost, which I hate, or I am constantly inquiring about the labels: “Who’s that again? What does that refer to?”
This weakness is much more a weakness than an inability: I can cope with it, it gets better with time and familiarity, and it hasn’t held me back in any significant way. And as I said, the connection with the math problems is speculative. What am I, a brain surgeon?
The computation bit, the numbers thing, well, this one is crystal clear. I cannot do math.
In School
It was the course I failed, always after the 4th grade. It was the class where everybody thought I was legit stupid. By high school, I had developed a daily bright-red rash on the way to math classes (which went away after the class) and begun having panic attacks in those classes. I drove my chemist-PhD father crazy with this; we fought over math homework regularly until I started hiding it from him, and then stopped doing it.
I cannot describe what went wrong in the classes, as that went on so long, completely unaddressed. I had a friend who would reteach the daily lesson to me one-on-one during the work portion of the class - and he’d get in trouble for it, for talking. I didn’t retain his lessons day-to-day, and I never, never understood why we were doing any of it.
Notably, I could do geometry. I understood triangles and could flip shapes around on charts and do stuff with shapes on graph paper. It seemed fundamentally different from the rest of the subject.
In the final math class I took, I recall one thing - a word thing. The teacher mentioned in passing that another word for 1 was “unity” and I exclaimed “Oh cool!” because I got it, and everybody laughed. It was the only thing that had made any sense to me in years.
In Life
In my adult life, I have found ways to avoid math and numbers for the most part. My partner does all of the financial stuff, thank god. I don’t even really know my salary - I stopped paying attention when I achieved the goal of not running out of money before the next check came. After that, I had enough, and stopped caring.
The way the issue manifests now is primarily in my calculations and sequence-memory. I can do sums in my head pretty well - you know, in keeping score in a darts or gin rummy game, or in giving change or submitting an expense report.
However, this ability is absolutely unreliable, like my sense of the labels “left” and “right.” I can easily tell you that 51 plus 16 is 67, but I can never trust that, because I will have the same exact feeling of certainty if I add it and get 76.
I do not try the other things much - multiplication and division, etc. I sometimes have an intuitive sense, but only with small numbers. I don’t know what trigonometry or calculus are. I use a calculator, but will still mis-transcribe the digits on the expenses form.
A lot of flipping happens: 756 in my head becomes any of 765, 567, 657, etc. Numbers any longer than three or four digits just sound like noise to me. I barely hear them and never remember them.
That’s the basics of my math thing. I have ways to cope - mnemonic devices, habits (like writing things down immediately, double-checking), and leaving the important number stuff to my partner, who fortunately likes that stuff.
I treat this inability as a teaching tool, always.
I tell kids without shame about the things I can’t do, and ask for their collective assistance when I need it. Modelling is a great tool, and I model workarounds, comfort with my challenges, and collaboration. Students know they can reveal their own weaknesses to me and to each other (over time), and hopefully become comfortable with the fact that they’re not great at everything. I often, often say that out loud: “Who’s good at everything?” and “Why should we need to be good at everything when we can share our strengths?”
I am certain that my natural empathy for struggling students sprung from these weird features of my mind. I hated feeling ashamed and do everything to shield them from that ignorant “How can you not know how to do that?” reaction.
Next time, I’ll trace how my own school experiences impacted me, how I began to work in this field, and how I then became a teacher. The endpoint will be to explain LDs and to present a model for thinking about them that I think is useful.
Thanks for reading. Please share this with someone who would like it, or could use it, and feel free to weigh in in the comments anytime.
Peace out
jep