kleenexwoman | meet me in the Indian summer?

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lolschool

meet me in the Indian summer?

Hah. Okay. So, my Algebra class starts tomorrow instead of three weeks from tomorrow like I had planned. The good thing about this is that it's 055, which means it's all stuff I learned in the eighth grade, because my dyscalculic brain can't handle anything more complex.

Wow, okay, I was sort of joking, but I just checked the Wikipedia article for dyscalculia, and lookit all my symptoms:

* Frequent difficulties with arithmetic, confusing the signs: +, −, ÷ and ×.
* Inability to tell which of two numbers is the larger.
* Difficulty with everyday tasks like checking change and reading analog clocks. (Change, sometimes. Analog clocks, most of the time.)
* Inability to comprehend financial planning or budgeting, sometimes even at a basic level; for example, estimating the cost of the items in a shopping basket or balancing a checkbook. (This is why I get balance reports from the ATM every day.)
* Difficulty with times-tables, mental arithmetic, etc. (Actually, I'm pretty good at this because it is very very simple.)
* May do fairly well in subjects such as science and geometry, which require logic rather than formulae, until a higher level requiring calculations is obtained.
* Difficulty with conceptualizing time and judging the passing of time.
* Problems differentiating between left and right. (I just point anymore. It's easier.)
* Having a poor sense of direction (i.e., north, south, east, and west), potentially even with a compass.
* Difficulty navigating or mentally "turning" the map to face the current direction rather than the common North=Top usage.
* Having difficulty mentally estimating the measurement of an object or distance (e.g., whether something is 10 or 20 feet away).
* Inability to grasp and remember mathematical concepts, rules, formulae, and sequences.
* An inability to read a sequence of numbers, or transposing them when repeated such turning 56 into 65.
* Difficulty keeping score during games.
* Difficulty with games such as poker with more flexible rules for scoring. (I can't even remember how to play Euchre.)
* Difficulty in activities requiring sequential processing, from the physical (such as dance steps) to the abstract (reading, writing and signaling things in the right order). May have trouble even with a calculator due to difficulties in the process of feeding in variables.
* The condition may lead in extreme cases to a phobia of mathematics and mathematical devices.

ETA: I'm reminded of the stereotype of girls not being good at math. Do you think having dyscalculia is a valid condition? The result of gender-based social programming, or a shitty educational system in general? Does being verbally gifted necessarily mean being mathematically deficient? Discuss.

The class isn't very long, and there's homework, but I expect the homework won't be particularly difficult, since the syllabus lists things that I've already learned but haven't thought about for years--Order of Operations and such. Probably a refresher course, good for keeping the mind sharp during the summer but not too taxing.

I can't believe how many things I want to do right now and how many things I could do. I have novels and stories to beta-read and now a screenplay to co-write (co-adapt?) and short stories to finish and E-mails to send and vague ideas for pretentious fan essays that will just have to wait. And I'm almost done with the hardest thing I have to do for school this summer. It's due tomorrow anyway. And then I CAN LIVE AND DO THINGS.

\o/

Also, Adult Swim is tonight and Seth and I have a bunch of movies that need watched before we incur massive late fees at the video store. BAD US. Um, we watched Wonder Boys, which was unexpectedly funny, and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which was an excellent postmodern parody of the noir genre, and then...well, we've been lying around watching movies and going out for walks and generally luxuriating in having the apartment to ourselves, since Sammi is gone for the next three weeks. Also, I have to clean the litterbox. :/ Because I am taking care of the cats now, you see.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Welcome to the world of the mathematically impaired! I myself cannot count to twenty-one without taking off my socks and dropping my pants.

Let's face it, programming calculators are mostly good for playing games on. The downside to them is that, unlike with the regular cheap Taiwanese calculators, you can't spell "boobs" readily. This is about all I remember from high school math.

Breathe deep, drink plenty of coffee, and if necessary write pi to 100 places on your arm. (My advanced calc teacher at Lathrup was one odd fellow; he got drafted for Vietnam because the lottery that particular year got screwed up and was weighted like 1000% toward people who happened to be born the week he was -- he could, and would, recite pi to 100 places. Whether he gained this ability in 'Nam I do not know, and was afraid to ask.)

See, I'm pretty good at basic calculation (I used to multiply and add large sums of numbers by hand for fun during particularly boring assemblies), I just hate plugging numbers into formulae. I did enjoy tinkering with my graphing calculator to automatically calculate things for me, but my 9th grade teacher made sure to erase all the saved programs on our calculators before tests, and after that we weren't allowed to use them during tests.

Oh jesus . . . okay, that's Rachel-Joe mind-meld matchup # googol. I did the same damn thing to pass time in gym or during high-school Nuremburg rallies. I'd stare at the clock and put the numbers together. Figured out that you could add 9 to any number x, get a new number y, and if you took apart the digits of x and those of y and added them together (separately, I mean), they'd be the same. To wit:

9 + 15 = 24
1 + 5 = 6
2 + 4 = 6

Me physics teach made us erase all the good programs, too (remember Race? and . . . a few others I'm forgetting), but someone always saved 'em as a backup.

I come from the days when QBasic was still a viable programming language for good teenage geeks, and my friend David still has the Huck Finn trivia program we made for our tenth-grade English project. (Public school teachers can get desperate for ideas sometimes.)

I think that playing around with numbers like that is just a normal geek/Aspie thing, tbh. You are mind-melded with about 1% of the general population.

Well, yes. I have a weird thing for historical dates being important, too. The rhythms of history, I call it. I have a notion for a graduate paper that entails life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness occurring in America at 89-year intervals on the approximate weekend of Independence Day: 1776 (the Declaration; life); 1865 (liberty; Lincoln's conspirators hanged, hence the end of the Civil War and a symbolic true end to slavery); and 1954 (happiness; Elvis records his first song at Sun Studios, and the pure products of America go crazy, meaning sex sex sex!!!).

But what does it all mean?

It means I'll get a doctorate and can bloviate at will to more and more generations of jaded college students to indoctrinate them with my whacked-out ideas and make 'em do my bidding! Duh?

Even still, tho, I bet I can read yer mind. You are thinking of . . . breakfast! Eh? Eh?

Hahaaaaaa, no.

Oh, come now. It's Sunday morning. Think bagels . . . lox . . . mmm . . .

God damn it, now I'm hungry.

I just drank three cups of coffee and took a new type of vitamin tablet that my stomach does not like. I don't even want to think about food.

Coffee, cigarettes, and random pills are all that a growing college student needs.

Oh yes, and then there was the time in gym one free day when I bounced a basketball nearly 1,500 times. I think the only reason I didn't get the crap kicked out of me back in the locker room by the much larger, much machoer, and much, much blacker other fellows was that I was just too weird.

I think that the ability to teach Math well may be abnormal, but the ability to do it well is most usually the result of bad teaching.

For some reason the East Europeans are really good at Math and the teaching of it. This is borne out by statistics, and all I can put it down to is tradition, because they are not so very different from anyone else in other ways. Every outstanding teacher of Math I have had has been from the east of Europe - Cerkeliunas and Wyszecki. The rest were dross.

I was nothing much above normal in Math at school, but under the enlightened later tutelage of those two giants I learned enough to take the subject into my own hands, and then finished a badly taught Physics degree by being able to work out the Math when nothing else was capable of being reasoned out of the gibberish taught. Similarly when doing a Control Systems MSc, I was able to swim through the treacle presented because I knew that it must be possible to do so, whilst half the intake could not remotely cope, and failed the degree.

But I've been able to get others through often enough myself. The key is that people's minds work differently, and they respond to one to one tuition - as far as I can see. I've got people who are Math averse through exams before now, and I really do think that the issue is mainly with the teaching, and not with the learners.

Teaching Math is in crisis in the western world, and standards are plummeting. We aren't getting stupider. We're being taught worse.

You may be on to something. The way I was taught to do math was very much like the way Victorian public schools apparently worked--lots of memorization, very little explanation. The only higher math I've really retained involves the X/Y axis, which I had taught to me several times until the correlation between the formula and the placement of points on the grid finally clicked.

I still can't remember left from right immediately, though.

I might be a bit combative at the moment; please bear in mind that an online friend killed herself the other night, and I'm just furious with a society that brands women with problems as whiners, and fills them with drugs. You never know, I might bite someone's head off, but if I do that will be why - preoccupation.

Ah, I see--I haven't gone through my friendslist yet today, so I have no idea what's going on in the larger part of the world. I'm very sorry to hear about your friend. Your fury is eminently justified.

You just articulated why I prefer to wallow in depression rather than seek help for it.

Then this is your gilt-edged chance to whine at someone and find that they actually care ;)

*offers hugs?*

It's why I never tell my parents if I'm depressed, anymore. 50/50 chance of being flaked off or sent to someone who will prescribe me something that won't help.

Off-topic: Did you get the invitation from zhura.com?

Yeah, just got it. :D

The thing about girls not being good at math . . . now that I think of it, if anything, it makes more sense for them to be better at math, because of menstruation. It's a built-in clock that males don't have.

The first calendar was little bits of bone marked with dates of some prehistoric woman's menstrual period, trufax.

I don't doubt it. And Caveman Oog wasn't clubbing Cavewoman Ooga and dragging her by the hair; he was running out of the cave once a month to go hang out at the neighborhood bar with Fred and Barney, because hell hath no fury like a menstrual Neanderthal.

Actually, "Cavewoman Ooga" was sending "Caveman Oog" off to club Fred and Barney over their heads so that she could get rid of the surplus men and their hormonal aggression!

I have some fun anthropology books to lend you if you ever get up here.

To say nothing of their atrocious animation. (I never could stand most Hanna-Barbara. Scooby-Doo and Rocky & Bullwinkle were my retro 'toons of choice as a kid, and that's about it. Oh, and He-Man. Yes, I was three years old and stupid in 1983. I'm sure you've got some similar skeletons in yer cartoon closet.)

Can I use them to make fire? Or fashion a primitive hammer with?

I was very fond of a Saturday morning cartoon called "Super Chicken."

Can I use them to make fire? Or fashion a primitive hammer with?
Yes. No. They're paperbacks. Ah, that's right, only cavewomen have the power of verbal skills. Okay, we're keeping the magic paper inside the cave where you can't get to it.

Fine with me. I'll be outside on my primitive toilet with my own magic paper (the Sunday Times) and a cup of coffee. Manliness! (I kid you not, most of my memories of my father when I was a kid involve him coming home from work and spending three hours in the can reading the paper. That was it.)

I assume you're familiar with retrojunk.com?

I'm the same way. Oddly, extreme troubles with math and things involving sequences and direction are very common among people with spina bifida (as is nonverbal learning disorder). They aren't sure why.

I know a guy who's as bad or worse at math than I am. It's more common with girls, but it's not just a gender-programming thing. (God knows my parents tortured me with enough supplementary math tutoring that I wasn't given the message that girls were supposed to be bad at math.)

It's co-morbid with Asperger's too. Wow, little clusters of disorders.

Y, the "math is hard for girls" meme always seemed like it was dying out; I knew girls in high school who were definitely math whizzes.

...of my existence. I don't think it's a gender thing at all because I know guys who suck at it and chicks who love it and can rattle off mathematical equations in their heads.

While I hide under my copies of Byron and Shakespeare and flip off Math. I tell Math to get the fuck away from me and I pull the pages of Shelley over my head. Math and I are not friends. We don't hang in the same circles. We don't have the same friends. Math is not welcome to cover and play in my sandbox.

Good luck with your class though! *hugs*

I really wish I could become more closely acquainted with Math, but Math does not like me. :( I know people who are very good at it and talk about how beautiful advanced calculus is, but it just makes my brain melt away into little bits. (Although I figure that's what sci-fi is for--making the really intense parts of science palatable to the literary types.)

*hugs back* Thanks!

To be honest, I don't want to know Math. I knew Math much better when I was in elementary school. But once we both got to junior high (that's middle school to most people), we had different expectations from each other than we started out with. By high school, we were barely speaking and once we got to college, we hated each other. There's no way to reconcile either. Neither of us truly wants it at this stage in life. Math has gone her way and I've gone mine.

Literature loves me best anyway. So I'll stick with him. :)

Seriously though, the fact that you're somewhat excited about this math class may make it easier for you.

I have had to work really, really, really hard at improving my conceptualizing of directions and maps. I always have to close my eyes and picture a compass, and it feels like my brain is literally hurting whenever I do it--usually it takes me ages to work it out, and I'm still not always correct. It sucks.

I have no concept of the measurement of distances. I also can't do tips and change, no matter how many zillions of times the formulas have been explained to me. I have no memory for the chronology of events over the long term. And I do have a serious flight response when it comes to anything mathematical.

Weirdly, though, I'm pretty good at Algebra. I just don't like it.

I cannot remember compass directions for the life of me. As a Midwesterner, I'm told that I'm supposed to have an innate ability to look at a cornfield and know which way is west or whatever, but I can't do it. I still get around by landmarks.

I can sort of "get" distances just by estimating inches or feet and then mentally multiplying, but time totally eludes me--particularly recently, it's sort of scary. Movies feel like they're ten minutes long.

I'm pretty good at basic algebra, too. Weirdly, I kind of like solving simple equations, but just because, hey, sense of accomplishment! Beyond that it's a pain in the ass.

I'm told that I'm supposed to have an innate ability to look at a cornfield and know which way is west or whatever

THAT'S WHAT CROP CIRCLES ARE FOR.

Oh, good. When the aliens are finished, we'll never need compasses again.

I've seen data saying that math ability is related to the working memory. If the person doing the math is afraid of failure and its related consequences, their working (short-term) memory fills up with anxiety and is unable to remember the steps in the process.

Victorian memorization tried to push information in the short term memory to the long term memory as much as possible.

PEACEMAKER

Oh, really? That sort of makes sense--do you have a link to a study or something? I've definitely got the fear of failure thing down.

Holy shit I have discalcula. or whatever it's spelled as. the clock thing, the distance thing, the left/right thing...i had to make a new years resolution to keep a checkbook balance...change is usually okay, but sometimes you just kinda have ta stare at it. i don't trust my mental math. you have diagnosed me!

It seems to be a common ailment. Clearly, human beings are not meant for mathematical reasoning and those who can understand numbers are mutants. THey can probably also shoot laser beams from their eyeballs.

I have trouble with analogue clocks, too! Haha.
I used to be great at maths - up until year 11/12 I got straight As and then I went down to Bs and I think even a C, which was horrifying to me. It just came so naturally to me but then everything got confusing. And because I don't 'practice', I suppose, I find even mental arithmetic to be a lot harder than it should.
But I don't have a phobia of calculators...Good luck with your class! =]

Thanks! And yeah, I started to drift away from math at, oh, 9th grade...that was also when I went to the International Academy and got pushed into math I really wasn't ready for. I still do mental arithmetic for fun if I'm bored, though.

Math is like any other skill: you have to be taught the proper ways and you have to practice. I'm pretty much not kidding when I say that I could have been a fucking math genius... I just never cared enough and didn't practice nearly enough. And? I hate analog clocks. I've never been able to play card games like poker. You know my issues with conceptualizing time. I used to frequently get the process correct in a complex problem and then blow it by transposing two numbers or making some comparatively minor calculation error. I was ace in science and geometry classes, but had far more difficulty in trigonometry (which can get hellish for anyone who has trouble keeping numbers and distances and things straight). So if I have all these issues and still like math and am capable of it... well, you know, I'm inclined to say it's more the teachers and the encouragement one gets than it is any innate inability to do math.

And all of my advanced math classes were fairly evenly matched between boys and girls.

Verbal/humanities stuff is easy for me to conceptualize, even if I procrastinate like a motherfucker on actually applying it, but math took so much mental effort I ended up saying to hell with it after a while. ...not like they're, you know, the same or anything, but for some reason I assumed they were. I was mostly terrible at figuring out how to apply formulae to problems; plugging in numbers came pretty easily to me with practice and a lot of fiddling around with the programs on my graphing calculator. IDK if it was the teachers or not; I had a few particularly crappy math teachers in high school, and the one decent teacher I had was in 9th grade, when I got pushed into advanced math without having any idea of what was going on. (Which was a mostly-female class, come to think of it.)

I'm not denying that there are different skill sets at work, nor that different people will have different abilities. I hate to sound crotchety, but I think a lot of people say that they are incapable of math (or have a disorder) when they simply haven't been taught or haven't put in the work to practice. Or just plain don't like it. Some people don't like reading for a whole host of reasons, and so it goes with math. Some people are also ignorant and poor with computers, but we haven't made up a disorder for that (yet). It's a similar family of skill sets, too, and the reason I think we do see more women who have trouble with math and computers and gadgetry is that there's a social idea that many of them get that they can't take chances or experiment with that sort of thing; most of these women are scared to screw up, whereas the men aren't as much.

And it's not that I think dyscalculia is entirely fake, but there's a lot of exaggeration going on. I had a difficult time with math in elementary school when they kept trying to teach math using more abstract concepts or rote memorization. Once they quit that and started being more upfront and number and logic-based ideas, I excelled. Was I suddenly cured of some disorder? Uh, no. The way the subject was being taught changed and also some of the pressure lifted.

A lot of people freak out about math when it's not that scary. It's actually reassuringly consistent compared to some other subjects.

*waves* Long time dyscalculic here, saying hi. :D

*waves back, possibly in wrong direction*

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

meet me in the Indian summer?

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Apophenia: It's fun!

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Math is the bane...

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