A Serendipitous Lunch with a Friend

photo courtesy of Stacy Bostrom Photography

As we sat in my small dining room having lunch together, my friend inquired about my daughters. She also had two daughters and we often connected about the joys and challenges of raising girls. I caught her up on the latest interests and shenanigans, and then I mentioned that my older daughter was having math difficulties in school.

We talked about the math situation briefly, and my friend shared a couple of stories about her own struggles with math as a young girl. We laughed as she told me how she barely made it through her college math exams. At some point, she mentioned that her troubles were due to a “math learning disability.”

A learning disability in math? I had never heard of such a thing. I wondered, how could someone be unable to understand something so seemingly straightforward as computing numbers? Sure, not everyone is good at math, myself included. But wasn’t math a clear system with a set process one learns or memorizes?

Still, I was at my whit’s end trying to understand why my otherwise bright third grader couldn’t seem to get simple math like 5-2=? Or why she couldn’t learn her multiplication tables no matter how hard she tried.

My friend didn't have a lot of details about the particular learning disability, but encouraged me to do a little research online to learn more. As soon as she left, I took her advice and searched, “Math Learning Disability.”

What I found completely took me by surprise. The website was Understood.org, a website describing various learning disabilities. I had hardly any awareness of the different learning disabilities, with just a little understanding of Dyslexia. The website had a post about a math learning disability called Dyscalculia, and included a list of the symptoms at different ages. As I looked over the symptoms, I began to cry.

I couldn’t believe it. The symptoms described expressed my daughter’s struggles completely. I had NO idea she was facing something like a learning disability. I just thought she was bad at math, and she’d get better with extra help. I assumed she would benefit from more focused study time at home, and more diligence in memorizing her math facts. It was becoming more clear that I was wrong.

It seemed that much of the average person’s basic understanding of working with numbers, was something that was very possibly unavailable to my daughter. If she indeed had Dyscalculia, our whole mindset and approach would need a major shift.

I needed to learn more about this Dyscalculia… (a word I wasn’t even sure how to pronounce.)

And so it was this lunch with a friend that sparked the whole process of uncovering all I could about this particular learning disability. What resulted was a complete change of our family’s trajectory on how we would ultimately help our daughter in her math struggles.

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