Sometimes, I wish I had any skill at all for operational math. But then I think if I did, I would’ve had a really high chance of going into academia.
With apologies to friends in academia, but it pays poorly and chances are I would’ve become an adjunct and have hated my life.
So I dodged two bullets. Avoiding academia because of complete dyscalculia and inability to do anything beyond basic algebra* was the first.
The second was journalism. Even though I was a journalist and was offered a pretty good civilian journalist job at Charleston’s main daily paper in 1999, I turned it down simply because I was tired of journalism.
Being bad at math helped me make so much more money than I otherwise would have.
Being sick of journalism also saved me from a life of probable penury.
So much stupid luck involved in living.
*Though I can easily understand the concepts behind any math, and understand 100% the solution to a problem when it’s explained, just can’t work out anything myself.
The time frame in which you came up is also part of dumb luck, since just a few years later employers were looking for CS degrees and the math you are bad at would’ve been a barrier to entry. It would’ve also been a barrier to entry for med school if you were so inclined.
How do you self diagnose as having dyscalculia anyways?
I cannot for the life of me do operational math with an old school calculator (because my brain forgets what I’ve added and entered, especially if I’m interrupted) or perform calculations in my head. I start transposing numbers if I’m tired or have to handle large numbers or large volumes of numbers.
I don’t know if I have clinical dyscalculia, but I certainly am very horrendous at math. People who says things like, “Surely you can learn this, you are so smart” just really don’t understand what it is like, nor how much time I have wasted on something that I’m just fundamentally bad at. Like good balance, it’s something I’ll never possess.
I do find it pretty hilarious that I could not get a degree in the field in which I’ve worked extremely successfully for over 15 years.
I would like to understand better what you mean by your dyscalculia. Can you give a problem that you cannot solve and explain why? For example:
– Is it hard for you to translate a problem into formulas? (unlikely, since you are good at programming)
– Can you solve simple geometrical problems?
– Is the problem with functions, integrals?
– Are you bad at finding proofs? (I am too)
You say that you can understand the solution when it is presented to you, but cannot work it out yourself. I know you will disagree, but this sounds like a mental block to me…
I see maths as a box of tools. If presented with a problem, you can blindly apply your tools and see what works. Talent is far less important than knowing the tools.
(Background: I’m a physicist and have worked as maths teacher and nowadays we are taught that dyscalculia does not exist, so I am interested in learning how we are wrong here — I have an open mind :)). But to me it is like someone claiming they have no talent to cook. I don’t think there is an cooking yes/no gene switch somewhere. Either you have practice or you don’t have practice….
I don’t feel like going into too much detail re-hashing issues I’ve already explained to others dozens of times, but yes, I have problems with all of those things.
I can’t translate problems into formulas unless I am given really explicit directions, and if I see a slightly new problem, I am again completely flummoxed.
I can understand functions and integrals, but if I see one, no matter how many times I’ve done one in the past, I am usually stumped. I can sometimes kinda sorta guess the answer, but it’s only a guess.
I’ve never successfully found a proof.
I had to drop a math class once I figured out I would’ve had to study (at the rate I was going) for 45-60 hours a day to possibly barely pass. Since there are only 24 hours in a day, this doesn’t really work out.
Part of it is — I am sure — that I find working on math and math problems extremely, extremely boring, but I’ve done many other extremely boring things in my life to achieve other ends without complaint. For this and other reasons, I don’t think I have a block because I am just not that kind of person and I have no emotional investment in it either way. Just is what it is.
I suspect if I had a really good tutor that I could work with 10-12 hours a day seven days a week, I could pass some of the simpler math courses with a barely-scraping-by C, because I am good at memorizing things and I could basically memorize nearly everything. But that doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to me and also sounds really expensive in time and money.
Also, I’ve noticed that if I study one area of math, I tend to completely and utterly forget all that I studied before. It’s just gone, irretrievably. No recall at all. So I can only hold in my head enough for a little bit at once — usually not enough to pass a test.
I completely disagree that dyscalculia does not exist. I wish I were better at math. I really do. But I think there is just a part of my brain that is devoted to other, more verbal tasks that can’t be re-purposed. I wish it weren’t so, but it is.
Truly, I am so dominant in verbal tasks on standardized tests and the like that I’d gladly drop into “only” the 95th percentile from the off the scale one if I could trade that for being even in the 60th percentile of math-related skills. The world alas doesn’t work that way, though. Would it did.