Hi there. Welcome to What in the World is Dyscalculia?
The podcast that is all about the specific learning
disorder for mathematics. I'm Dr. Honora Wall.
I'm your host of the podcast. If you've listened
before, welcome back. If you're new to the podcast,
thank you for joining us. The podcast is sponsored
by Educalc Learning, which is our for -profit
arm that offers teacher training, certification
in being a Dyscalculia Specialist and K -12
classes for students with Dyscalculia. And
coming this fall, we'll be adding PreCalc to
our lineup, so I'm very excited about that. You
can also find a lot of information for free at
thedtri .org. That's the Dyscalculia Training
and Research Institute, and that is a 501c3 dedicated
to changing the lived experience of people with
dyscalculia. And I am starting this podcast episode
with a recent epiphany I had about myself, which
doesn't seem to surprise too many other people
I've told it to, which is interesting in and
of itself. And I think this one will really land
for the older listeners, especially adults who
grew up in a time where, like I did, it didn't
matter if you had a problem in school, you needed
to figure it out. And growing up with that system
where dyscalculia only existed in the neurology
research, maybe a little bit of psychology research
and not very much in the educational space, When
I was coming through K -12, even dyslexia was
pretty new, just starting to gain awareness and
certainly nowhere near the understanding and
training that we have today. So that's good news
for us in the world of dyscalculia and dysgraphia,
dyspraxia. We can see the path forward through
funded research opportunities that really help
us nail down the right interventions and accommodations
for all of the specific learning disorders and
other types of neurodivergence. But here's my
epiphany. I have dyscalculia and I thought that
I did not because I've spent the last 20 something
years doing math all day every day as a classroom
teacher in my research around dyscalculia and
in my awareness and training campaigns for dyscalculia.
So I do want to talk a little bit about that
how this epiphany happened and how did this come
about and if you're not sure if you have dyscalculia
or if you think that you definitely don't but
you have all the indicators then maybe it's something
for you to consider and that's really what what
happened to me. I have all of the indicators
of dyscalculia. I always did. My K -12 math experience
was highly unpleasant, highly unpleasant all
the way through. And as much as I was smart and
capable in every other subject area, math did
not land for me in any way shape or form. And
everyone I knew and everyone who knew me just
defined me as a person who was not capable of
doing math. I just couldn't do it. And then later
on as an adult, I ended up going back to the
beginning. If you've read my book, Teaching Students
with Dyscalculia, you know a little bit of this
journey, but I'm going to have to make a second
edition of that book because in the introduction
I say I don't have dyscalculia because I just
didn't know. I had very much internalized that
the reason why I could not do math is because,
see if any of these adjectives ring true for
you, I was flighty. I was distracted. I was uninterested.
I wasn't trying hard enough. And that's why I
couldn't do it. And if I would have just applied
myself, then I could have. That's completely
false. It's an absolutely false narrative and
it's part of the self blame and shame that most
people with dyscalculia feel even now when we're
getting better at discussing learning disabilities
and we're getting better at discussing and Identifying
and hopefully officially diagnosing Learning
disabilities like dyscalculia even as that's
a bigger part of our narrative there's still
that feeling of self -blame and shame for people
who have a learning disability. So I had all
the indicators. I had to go back and teach myself
math as an adult and I mean in my early 30s going
back taking my son's second and third grade math
textbook and starting at page one. It was a lot.
It took a really long time. And there were a
lot of weeks of crying over third grade word
problems. It took a really long time for me to
figure these things out. And a lot of that was
working out the trauma of my K -12 math experience.
That's certainly a large piece, especially for
anyone listening who's over 30. You're going
to have a lot more of that. Not that our younger
students, our listeners under 30, don't have
it. They absolutely do. But hopefully we are
starting to address that more and change that
trajectory. All right. So I had to work through
teaching myself math. I had to figure out what
worked for me. And then as I got into teaching
math and working with struggling students and
then later hearing about and then studying dyscalculia,
One common phrase I would hear from my students
all the time, I still do, is why does it make
sense when you say it? It doesn't make any sense
when my teacher tells it to me. Why didn't anybody
say it this way before? And I've always said,
you know, I really don't know. I have no idea.
It seems so obvious to me. Well, that's because
I think about math differently. I process it
differently and I understand it differently.
Not that I don't understand it. Today I can do
all sorts of math, quite a bit of it in my head.
I still think about it differently because when
I think about my interpretation of math and my
expression of math and what's exciting and interesting
about math, most math teachers look at me with
a blank face. It's not really landing for them
what I have to say. So there is a disconnect
and now it makes sense to me. Part of that disconnect
is that I have a neurodivergent way of thinking
about math. That is still true when I work with
other dyscalculia experts and teacher trainers
who focus a lot on the elementary math and manipulatives
and that CRA, concrete representational abstract
method of teaching, which is fantastic. Not so
much for me. So there is that disconnect, but
now that makes a lot more sense to me. I shared
this with one of our board members at the DTRI
who was part of the team that developed the free
online screener at dysctest .com. D -Y -S -C.
I really do like that screener quite a bit. But
I was sharing this sort of epiphany with her
and she said, yes, you told me that two, three
years ago when you took our screener. And I said,
but I don't think the screener said, I have dyscalculia.
She said, it's to add a lot of maybes and a lot
of indicators and you don't get maybes and indicators.
you don't have this different way of thinking.
And I got those maybes and those indicators because
I've been doing math for 20 years all day every
day. I know enough about the patterns. I know
how we ask questions. I know what to expect.
So I'm going to skew results if I take a true
diagnostic assessment. If I did a neuropsych
eval I would bet I would have to use a discrepancy
model to really see a difference. And here's
why. Again, I know enough about math now and
I know enough about pattern recognition and test
taking strategies that I'm quite sure my math
scores would be above the 25th or 30th percentile,
which is usually our cutoff for dyscalculia or
for learning disabilities, whatever happens to
be looked at in the evaluation. So I know those
scores would be outside of the acceptable range.
However, I know from other tests that I've taken,
getting into graduate school and SAT performance
and things like that, that my other score areas
outside of math usually land in the 97th percentile.
But there would be enough of a discrepancy between
those two to make the learning disability really
stand out. Now, I've been studying dyscalculia
for more than a decade, probably close to 15
years of being solidly in this camp, not even
just trained as a classroom teacher, understanding
the pedagogy, understanding how to teach adult
learners, understanding math, just really deep
diving into this learning disability. But I did
not think of myself as being in that camp. because
of those negative terms that have been put on
me by pretty much everyone I knew, especially
all the adults around me from day one. Not to
put a blame on other adults and teachers at that
time, nobody was talking about any of these things.
Even ADD and ADHD did not exist as something
we talked about when I was in the K -12 system.
So I can look back through that lens of what
I know now and see where a lot of my issues and
my friends, where they had issues, where things
came from. We just didn't know. When you know
better, you do better, and you can't know until
you know. That's why the DTRI works so hard at
awareness around dyscalculia and around the truth
about neurodivergence. That's why we do so many
of our social media reels and so many different
platforms and speak at as many conferences as
I can get to and get the word out in as many
spaces as possible. It would have completely
changed my trajectory had I known, had anyone
around me known when I was younger what the issue
was and how to help me get around that barrier.
Now, of course, From this vantage point today,
I have to be grateful for the way things went
because if someone had held me out before I never
would have been able to do the work that I'm
doing today, which I find highly gratifying.
I love working with my students of all ages and
I still tend to work with older students and
adults more than elementary. We'll save that
for another podcast episode. partly because I
still don't like that kind of work. I find it
to be the least interesting part of math. And
one day I'd like to retire so I can't start working
with younger students or I'll never be able to
get them across the finish line in retirement
fashion. So there's lots of reasons for why I
choose which grade levels I work with. So I need
to make a second edition of my book and change
that introduction. I need to get the word out
in a lot of different spaces. So hopefully I
can reach other adults who are having the same
experience and so that we can change the experience
for younger students. That's why early identification
and screening is so important. However, a lot
of us don't get early identification and screening,
myself included, so we have to be able to help
people where they are today. and make sure that
dyscalculia is not a barrier to upper level math.
It never should be. To make sure dyscalculia
is not a barrier to a high school diploma, it
should never be. And to make sure dyscalculia
is not a barrier to a college degree and to careers
chosen by the person, not by the systemic experience
around math classes. So my epiphany was really
eye -opening, really clarified a lot of things.
It did feel a lot like a camera lens that got
clicked into the right focus. And then I said,
oh, wow, so many things make sense now. They
really do. So if you're not sure whether or not
you have a learning disability, there are lots
of ways you can find out. There are a lot of
screeners for dyslexia out there. There are some
screeners for dyscalculia out there. And then
we need to get a little better at screeners for
dysgraphia and dyspraxia. There's a lot of information
and screeners out about ADHD or autism spectrum.
So find that information. Keep looking. And here's
an indicator for you to keep with you. If the
message you're telling yourself is that you struggle
because you're lazy, That is false. If you're
telling yourself that you struggle because you're
flighty or distracted, that is false. If you're
telling yourself you struggle because you really
haven't tried as hard as you could, I mean you
could try a little harder, that is false. So
the minute you start having negative self -blame,
that's a pretty good sign that you're on the
wrong path. You want to talk to professionals,
you want to look at some screeners, you want
to get some more information and take an unbiased
look. Not through a lens of self -blame, but
through a lens of what we know about indicators
for learning disabilities. Get some information,
talk to some people, and give yourself some grace
and mercy. I'm Dr. Honora Wall. and I'm going
to go read some more about myself and my newly
discovered learning disability that I've been
carrying around for a really long time but haven't
been paying too much attention to as it relates
to myself. Thank you for listening to What in
the World is Dyscalculia? If you have any questions
or comments or would like to see some different
topics in the future, please reach out. I'd love
to hear from you. You can email me at honora,
h -o -n -o -r -a, at the d -t -r -i dot org,
or honora at eduCalcLearning dot com if you have
questions about our teacher training and our
online math classes for students. And you can
find me on a lot of social media outlets. And
be sure to join our teachers support group on
Facebook so that we can build capacity and a
network. of teachers who are understanding and
helping students with dyscalculia. Thanks for
listening. See you soon.