Last year during the beginning of the pandemic shutdown, our family was renting a home near a beautiful, tree-filled nature preserve. We became familiar with the preserve’s winding trails on our daily walks, grateful for the much-needed break from the stress of online learning and being in the house together all day.

One afternoon on our walk we spontaneously decided to split up to test which path back to the house was the shortest. My younger daughter and I ran along in one direction while my older daughter took the other path.

We arrived back to the head of the trail, breathless from the run up a steep hill. My other daughter was waiting for us, “Where have you been? I’ve been waiting here for 15 minutes!"

I laughed, assuming she was exaggerating the time to tease us. It obviously hadn’t been 15 minutes since we separated. “Nice try," I responded, "We only left you about two or three minutes ago.”

She paused, thoughtful. “I never thought of that before!”

“You never thought of what before?”

“I never knew that when people said, “15 minutes” that it meant an actual amount of time.”

It reminds me of something I read in one of my favorite books on dyscalculia, Brian Butterworth’s, Dyscalculia – From Science to Education:

“I have argued that dyscalculia can be understood as a deficit in the most basic capacity for number - the ‘core deficit’ - upon which everything in number work is built. What this means in practice is that most of what you find blindingly obvious – so obvious, in fact, that you don’t even realise that you know it – dyscalculics may struggle with. This is because the relationship between numbers and sets is not secure…

It doesn’t help that the words used in number work are so ambiguous. Just take the word, ‘five’. This could mean a set of five objects, in which case, it would imply all the partitions of five such that the set contains the smaller subsets of four, three, two and one objects. It could mean a rank or a position in an ordering – as in a page number or house number, in which case page five is not bigger than page four, and house five is not bigger than house four, and certainly doesn’t contain it. ‘Five’ could also have a non-numerical meaning: Channel 5 on TV, or on a football shirt.” (Butterworth, p.146)

I hope that by sharing these very real and everyday “dyscalculia moments“ that they will either normalize your own experience with dyscalculia, or they will provide you a glimpse into what it is like to be dyscalculic.

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