Hello everyone and welcome to this episode of What in the World is Dyscalculia?
I'm your host Dr. Honora Wall and this podcast is put on by Educalc Learning.
Please visit EducalcLearning.com for lots of information and resources and
training in the Math Learning Disability Dyscalculia. You can also visit our
nonprofit, the Dyscalculia Training and Research Institute, thedtri.org.
Lots of excellent free resources there as well. And in today's episode I want to
talk a little bit about something that's a little bit of a, I don't know if I want
to say a conflict or a paradigm shift that we we want to discuss when we talk
about Dyscalculia. This is an area where I feel a lot of educators and parents
struggle and even some experts there's some disagreement on what's the best
route to take for helping students who have Dyscalculia in the area of fixing
or solidifying or finishing that math foundation before giving access to higher
level math. And I'm sure that you know you're gonna get it as many opinions as
you listen to different people on this one. Opinions plus three dollars will
get you a small coffee but I'm gonna give you mine. Mine is based off of my
experience for many years working with people of all ages and grade levels who
have Dyscalculia. Typically I work with high school students, college students,
or adults and that can skew my opinion certainly. I have taught elementary
grades in the past. It's not my forte or my skill set and I prefer working with
older learners. Anything from sometimes middle school but mostly that high school
adult learners and college students. So that's where most of my experience comes
from. Now I'm a huge advocate for early screening, early identification, and early
interventions. Absolutely that's going to make a huge difference. The sooner you
find out you have a problem in any area of your life and you address that problem
the more progress you're gonna see and the better long-term outcomes you're
going to find. However with the math learning disability I have absolutely
100% every single time for years seen students who are perfectly capable and
able to do grade level work no matter what kind of background experience they
have had. It can be frustrating of course. It can take a little longer to get
done of course and our typical Gen Ed classroom is not designed really to meet
the needs of these students in a lot of ways. That's a systemic problem that's
not a person problem or a learning challenge problem. Let me explain exactly
what I mean because I'm not coming down on Gen Ed teachers who do a lot of work
to accommodate all of their students and a lot of higher level math incorporates
quite a few of the accommodations that we like to see especially calculator use.
The problem for our students is that they've had eight-ish years of training
and indoctrination that the calculator is lava and you cannot touch it and if
you touch the calculator you are not doing math and that's just false. Mental
math is a great parlor trick and if you're good at it fantastic sign up and
get that free sticker they give out to people who are good at mental math. Oh
there's no free sticker. Okay so moving on. If you're good at mental math awesome.
If you're not you can still be good at math. You can still be a good problem
solver, pattern recognizer, you can have good visual spatial skills, you can still
get through algebra, you can still get through calculus and you can still get
through geometry and you're probably going to enjoy those a lot more but if
someone hands you a calculator you've never been allowed to touch before and
the numbers didn't make sense to you anyway then the calculator does not make
sense on its own. So in higher level math we want to allow for a little bit of
training, a little bit of walking around the room and asking students put this and
this into the calculator and tell me what happens. Tell me what you get for an
answer. If they get the right answer you're looking for then you can reinforce
that super whatever buttons you hit in that order you're doing it exactly right
keep doing that. Now the brain has confirmation it knows exactly what you
want it to do. Check, strengthens that neurological pathway, check and it
continues on. If a student gets the wrong answer then you can say all right
let's take a look at your calculator. Maybe we need to hit the clear button
seven times. Maybe we need to look at the order. Are you hitting the radical sign
before the number or do you have to hit the number first and then tell the
calculator to find the root? Are you taking the correct button and using it
for a square root or do we need one with extra letters so that you can put in any
root? Or do we want an X to the squared button as our visual? Do we want X to the
Y button or Y to the X button so that we can put in any kind of exponent? Does the
student understand the vocabulary you're using? Take a moment to clarify that.
Every calculator works differently so if you have a room full of people using a
different calculator or what typically happens a room full of people who never
brought their calculator actually with them into the room now you might need to
answer a few more questions. If you take the time at the beginning of class to
make sure everyone knows what buttons to hit in what order on their particular
calculator now we can solve a million problems and now we can get confidence
and mastery. We've removed the barrier that was in the person's way. That is a
huge part of upper-level math for students with dyscalculia. The earlier
math that they struggled with is not something we're even focusing on anymore.
We're just not asking those kind of questions even when we multiply and
divide. In upper-level math we're using some very small numbers. We're not
multiplying three digits by two digits and throwing in a bunch of decimals. Now
we're doing negative 12 divided by 2. That comes up over and over and over again.
We're multiplying 3 by a whole bunch of different stuff. That's it. So the idea
that you have to be perfect at the nightmare math of third and fourth and
fifth grade in order to do upper-level math is really not true. The problem for
high school and college educators is that you've got a bunch of people who
have not had any math success or very little math success to rely on. So their
prior knowledge reinforces learned helplessness. Their prior knowledge
reinforces that this is not an area they can succeed in. That's what they're
used to and that's what they're expecting. You need to make that break. The
other problem is that you're going to have a whole bunch of students coming in
who seem like they don't have the basic skills that they need to keep up with you.
Okay, take five minutes. At the beginning of every class state explicitly and
directly exactly what you're going to be doing that day. Make sure everyone knows
how to use their tools properly to get that thing done and then you can have a
longer conversation about the concept, about the why this is true. If you will
make sure that your students with dyscalculia have success with the numbers
first, then you've removed that frustration, you've removed the barrier,
you've shown them that they can succeed in your class, and then they will talk to
you all day about tying equations and functions to graphs and how do you
interpret a why intercept and what does it mean if you have a certain number of
curves in your graph based on the exponent in your function, then they're
right there with you because you made sure that the numerical barrier is out
of the way. Let's contrast that with what typically happens is that we take a
student who has trouble with mental math or trouble remembering their basic facts
or trouble feeling confidence and we put them into interventions that mimic the
third, fourth, fifth grade situation that they already failed in. That is not a
recipe for success. That is psych 101, you don't do the same ineffective thing
over and over and over again and expect to suddenly find success. That's not
going to happen for students who have dyscalculia because their parietal lobe
loses math information over time and those basic facts are held almost in
neurological pathways that are like gossamer strings. They're very light
and they don't fire as fast sometimes or as completely sometimes or it's almost
like watching one end of a spider web floating around not really attached to
the rest of the web. You can tell that they're looking and they're thinking and
they're trying to find the numbers and they're just not finding the other end
of that neurological connection. The axons and the dendrites are just really
not solid for them in that case. Okay, if we teach math we are actually not
brain specialists designed to increase neurological pathways. We can, there's a
million ways to do it and they're actually very simple and they're going to
make you happy and your students happy but that's a topic for another day. A lot
of educators got into this field not because they wanted to know about the
brain and how it works and not because they wanted to be the kind of person
who spends all day enriching neurological pathways. That's not why they do this
job and that's perfectly fine. That's acceptable. Take the few minutes, make
sure each student knows how to use their calculator correctly and then move on to
the next part of the conversation. Students with dyscalculia can and should
do grade level work at all times. Taking an older student and making them repeat
the nightmare of third, fourth, fifth grade math in the exact same way they
always did it before is ineffective. It's a waste of your time. It's certainly a
waste of their time and it's an external barrier that keeps students from
having the success they are capable of in upper level math. So to wrap it up, if
you want to make a real immediate difference in mathematical performance
for students with dyscalculia, you're going to give them grade level work. You're
going to explicitly and directly show, tell, and watch them do the steps with
their external tool. Be it a calculator, be it a 1 to 100's chart, be it the old
fashion times tables list, the list of multiplication, you're going to see
immediate differences and immediate success. And once you give them that, then
they will be with you for the entirety of the rest of your conversation about
upper level math concepts. They're going to have great questions, they're going to
have great insights, you're going to transform their math experience, and
you're going to have a better time teaching. So for older students, use the
right intervention, use the right accommodation, break the cycle of
reteaching elementary level math in the elementary level math way, and that's a
great way to do it for students who are neurotypical. It's also a pretty effective
way to do it for students who are struggling with a weak foundation or
low numeracy. It just happens to be completely inappropriate for students
with the math learning disability, dyscalculia. I'm Dr. Honora Wall and thank
you for listening to this episode of What in the World is? Dyscalculia. If you
have questions or comments about this episode or about the math learning
disorder in general, please find me on social media, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube,
we have a teacher support group on Facebook, and check out my websites
educalclearning.com and the dtri.org. You can email me and I'd be
happy to get more information to you. Thanks for listening to What in the
World is? Dyscalculia. We'll see you next time.