meet me in the Indian summer?

[kleenexwoman]

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.

Comments

[drworm.livejournal.com]

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.

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

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.)

[drworm.livejournal.com]

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.