Dyscalculia

Okay… As I had a bit of a fight with someone earlier, and I’ve calmed down from that, I wanna talk about something form the MLP episode “Testing Testing 1, 2, 3″.

See, for those who may not know, I suffer from dyscalculia*. Numbers confuse the ever-loving hell out of me, but give me real-world applications and word problems, and I’ll work it out just fine. It’s how I’ve been learning geometry (S-V-G! S-V-G!), for example.

I can understand “This triangle is # units from A to B, # units from B to C, and # units from C to A, and has angles X, Y, and Z.” But if you put that into a simplified mathematical equation, I’d probably just flip off the whiteboard, turn around, and walk away. I understand what the symbols stand for, and I know how it works, but I can’t conceptualize it at all in my head.

The thing is, people seem to think that, with these sorts of learning disorders, you just need to find the “right way to teach someone”. And in “Testing Testing 1, 2, 3″, it’s kinda portrayed like that. The thing is, it’s not that simple. Not even in the slightest.

I’m practically incapable of learning advanced mathematics, for the simple reason that they’re conceptual in nature. While they have real-world applications to solving certain advanced problems, they don’t have uses that could be used to help teach someone like myself, and showing me all of the visual aids in the world won’t help me. My brain just doesn’t work that way, and it never has. And textbooks aren’t made for someone like me. They’re made to a “lowest common denominator” of standards.

And yet, because of how people see such disorders, it becomes frustrating when some of those people push the idea of “you’re just learning wrong”. Trust me, I’m not learning wrong. I hit my limit. It’s something I have to live with while I try to learn other things. It’s not like it’s stopping me from doing better elsewhere, since STEM isn’t the be-all-end-all of education**.

I’m a creative person. My lack of logic and understanding in certain fields—as well as my willingness to throw the “theories are law” mentality of many people out the window***—actually help me make better fantasy stories, simply because I’m not worrying about adhering to laws and physics of the real world most of the time.

So, in a way, my “disorder” is also a gift. And while some don’t see it as such, I often do.

Now, if only my lack of depth perception wasn’t so strong…

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* I’m only linking from Wikipedia because it’s only slightly less pompous than most of the top hits I got on Google and DDG.

** Even though some people in the STEM fields would actually enjoy seeing their fields tear apart all others until only they’re left standing.

*** Because I’m a Mac user. (ba-dum tish)