Dyscalculia Impacts More Than Just Math Class – Part 1

When our daughter received a diagnosis of Dyscalculia, well-meaning people would try to encourage us by responding with statements like, “Well at least it’s not something too important in life, she can just use the calculator on her phone, and when she’s an adult there are lots of careers not math-related.”

Initially, I thought maybe this was true. Maybe all we needed was to help our daughter get through the next nine years of school, or thirteen, if she attended a university. If we could just figure out how to get through the education piece, and if she could avoid a career involving math, she would be just fine. Not a big deal.

I see now that I was mistaken, and this thought process was probably a form of my own denial of reality. Or maybe it was simply that I was naive and didn’t yet know all it would mean.

Over the past few years, I have observed how Dyscalculia impacts a great deal more than how one performs in math class. In a world set up for the majority who has a particular understanding of numbers, our daughter is clearly at a disadvantage.

One area impacted by Dyscalculia is her ability to memorize and reliably remember important number sequences. Before knowing about Dyscalculia, I never stopped to think about how many number sequences are a part of our daily lives, sequences like phone numbers, addresses, bus routes, confirmation numbers, and card pin numbers. The list goes on.

For our daughter’s 10th birthday we bought her a turquoise blue bike off Craigslist. We also purchased a cute bike basket so she could carry her books, stuffed animals, and treasures around on our neighborhood bike trail. The other item we purchased was a simple bike lock with a 4-digit code. While the bike was a perfect gift, both the metal basket and the lock were a total bust. The cute metal basket was too heavy for our light-weight girl, and no matter how hard she tried, she could not remember the 4-digit combination for her bike lock. The bike basket found its way to the garage shelf where it sat waiting for a future day of use, and the lock was replaced by one that unlocked via a 4-letter word (I don’t mean that kind of word), which she had no trouble at all remembering.

Similarly, we were excited when we learned that a local credit union would offer higher than usual interest on child savings accounts. I opened up accounts for both our daughters, and they chose their own bank card pins. My dyscalculic daughter chose one that she immediately linked up to a mnemonic device to help her remember the pin. This was a trick she will sometimes use with some success, depending on the situation. For example, if the number was 3246 she might try to remember it as “3 bears went 2 (to) the store 4 (for) 6 bowls of porridge.” In this case, the pneumonic device she chose only helped her remember some of the numbers, while she continued to forget some of the numbers in the pin, for example, “How many bears was it? How many bowls was it?” While her rhyme does help her remember most of her pin, I have noticed that to this day, she cannot remember the pin without being reminded by me or having it written down.

Since my awareness of dyscalculic learners has grown, I have noticed how many number sequences we use in our daily lives. As a culture we use them to categorize all sorts of areas, and sadly this way of organizing can leave those with Dyscalculia completely in the dark.

How about the sequence of address numbers for our homes, sometimes 5-6 digits long, all numbers that can get jumbled or forgotten? It took a long time for our daughter to memorize the numeric portion of our address, and even when she finally did, she would sometimes remember the correct numbers, but have the order mixed up.

One day I sat waiting for my children after school and looked at all the buses lined up differentiated only by a number. I wondered about the students who have trouble keeping sequences of numbers straight. Do they often end up on the wrong bus? Was it #54 or #45 they were supposed to take? I realized that just catching a bus could be a very stressful daily event for these children, if getting home each day hinged on their ability to remember their bus number. It would be even more stressful if the grownups in their lives were annoyed and became upset at the child for not remembering correctly.

Part of our journey has been helping our daughter find ways to navigate her world without memorizing so many numbers. She uses tricks like mnemonic devices, or songs that she has an easier time remembering, or like the bike lock, we try to get creative with other ways of recording important information in a way that is quickly accessible. Thank goodness we are now in an age where so many phone numbers do not have to be remembered, because my phone number is the only one my daughter can manage at this point. I’m grateful, that by some miracle, she seems to be able to keep that number correctly in her head!

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