Hello and welcome to the What in the World is Dyscalculia podcast presented by Educalc
Learning.
I am your host, Dr. Honora Wall, and today I want to talk about one of my favorite success
stories.
They're not all success stories and there will be podcasts where I talk about times
where interventions did not work for students and why I think that happened.
Especially for me, I do have a lot more success stories than not.
I recently got some information about one.
I'm going to call this student Betty for the purposes of our podcast.
Betty is dear to my heart.
I first met Betty when she was leaving fifth grade and decided not to go back to a brick
and mortar school.
She was going to home school.
She had a diagnosis of dyslexia and dyscalculia and she had had such a terrible time in elementary
school.
Working with tutors and teachers who were trying to help but who didn't understand her
learning challenges and she just wasn't very successful.
And she really internalized that which unfortunately is such a common story for people with dyscalculia
and very heartbreaking for children.
By the end of elementary school, this young girl had decided she could not do math in
any way, shape, or form and never would be able to that she did not enjoy reading and
that she felt so in her words dumb and I hate when students talk that way about themselves.
It's heartbreaking but she felt so inadequate compared to her peers.
She felt like everyone knew she wasn't good enough.
She felt like the smarter kids were making fun of her and she knew she was behind and
she was incredibly bright.
Very sharp girl, very quick learner, an amazing musician, and a great artist.
Just could not find success in a traditional classroom and had given up.
Well luckily they found a wonderful reading tutor in South Florida who is a colleague
and friend of mine and Betty was starting to have a lot of success with her reading
progress.
Not so much with the math.
Her mom was pretty good at math.
We didn't think that the learning disability was hereditary.
Her dad was an engineer.
There was a lot of pressure from the family not from her parents but what she internalized
for herself because everyone else in the family seemed to get math so much easier and faster.
Her older sister never had a problem succeeding in any traditional classroom and her younger
brother seemed to be on the same track so it was really only Betty who was sticking out
as this sore thumb who just could not succeed in school and could not understand math.
So the reading tutor recommended me as a math tutor because of my specialization in dyscalculia.
So I started working with Betty and she was very nervous.
We did remote tutoring because I was not living in Florida at the time.
And our first couple of sessions were getting to know each other, talking about her past
experiences, finding out how she defined herself as a math student which was not a math student
in her words and hearing from her mom about how the experience had gone for the family.
The first couple of sessions mom sat in and this is very common in my experience because
the students have had such a terrible time from teachers and from previous tutors who
make them feel inadequate, who make them feel like they're failing and make them feel like
there's something wrong with them.
So they have a lot of anxiety when they first start working with me and a lot of fear of
what the experience is going to be like.
They think they're going to be asked a lot of questions they cannot answer.
They think they're going to be quizzed on things they don't know and they fear they're
going to let me down, let their parents down, waste everyone's time and money and they put
so much pressure on themselves before we even sit down to say hello that the first thing
I do is try to help everybody relax.
We just take a moment to breathe.
We just tell some stories about what math has been like before.
I like to ask students questions about what went well, what didn't go well, let them talk
out their experience.
They have to get out those old emotions so that they are ready for some brand new emotions.
They had tried working on different curriculums at home, going through different math books
that have been recommended by people looking at different online programs.
Betty hated working with online programs because there was no one she could ask a question
to and she couldn't teach herself from the text partly because of the dyslexia and couldn't
really get a handle on what they wanted her to do for the math because of the dyscalculia.
Her mom had tried helping.
There was a lot of fighting going on at home and arguing a lot of tears.
That also is something I find common and heartbreaking.
So the second thing I like to do with my students is talk about how the family is going to stop
having these stressful times together.
The family needs to have positive times together.
Students and young children need to be enjoying the little bit of time they have before our
kids grow up and go off to college and move away.
It happens in the blink of an eye.
As a parent myself, that time is sacred and precious in my opinion.
You've got to protect it.
So arguing over math homework is not how you want to spend your time as a family.
So we stop that right away.
After we've gotten through some of the old stories and we've decided we are not doing
family homework anymore going forward, then we talk about some goals.
I really like to talk with my students about what kind of goals they have for themselves.
It puts them in a place of control.
It lets them establish our path forward.
It lets me see what's important to them.
And then we can also talk about math standards for the year if we're trying to stay on grade
level, what kind of topics are most important for their age and grade if we're trying
to build a stronger foundation, and what kind of methods and materials work best for the
student and we can put together whatever we want.
If you are tutoring people with dyscalculia of any age, I highly recommend you move away
from the textbooks.
People with dyscalculia have seen those for years.
They look at them and they know this is a big red flag of failure.
If you're tutoring, hopefully you know your topics well enough that you can look up your
standards by state.
You can look up what your local schools are doing by grade level and have an idea of what
needs to be covered.
Talk about those things without the textbook.
Those different examples mix and match.
Online materials.
There are so many websites that have resources you can choose from.
You can Google pretty much anything and find a worksheet.
You can use the textbook to give you a starting place, but get out of those trigger areas
as much as possible.
Make some things up on your own and make some things up with the student while you're going
through your lessons.
You will get to the standards you need to reach.
You will cover all the topics that you need to cover.
You don't have to do it according to modules in an online program or chapters in a textbook,
especially before you get into high school.
Here in the U.S., once you get into high school, now we're really concerned about the transcript.
We're really concerned with having accredited courses or we're concerned with establishing
a homeschool program where you're keeping a portfolio of work signed off at the end
of the year by a certified teacher.
Then when you have your paperwork together for college applications.
Before high school, that is not the important part.
No college application wants to know what happened in sixth and seventh grade math.
They just want to see through high school courses and through placement tests and standardized
tests like ACT, SAT, PERT tests, whatever college placement test is required where you're
looking at.
Now we want to see that the foundational knowledge is there.
When you're working with students in elementary and middle school, you really can pick.
Use your tutoring materials or your course and class materials and progression based
on student needs.
You'll get a lot farther, a lot faster and everyone will be happier with the process.
They're going to be happy with the results once the process makes sense.
So the results are really going to take care of themselves if you've set up the process
the right way.
And for Betty, our way in came through art.
It could have come through music because she's a very accomplished young musician.
But I'm not.
I can't play a musical instrument to save my life.
I can listen to music and appreciate it.
But you certainly don't want me talking about music or playing an instrument.
So that one would have worked for her, but not for me.
We couldn't find access through math because I knew math and she did not when we first
started working together.
And she was very resistant for the reasons I've already said.
So that would not have worked because it would have worked for me, not her.
The place where we could both come together was in art.
And Betty is much better of an artist than me.
She's a phenomenal artist.
She would make collages, she would do photography, she would freehand draw, and really made images
come to life.
So we would talk about art.
We would talk about math and art.
We talked a lot about different famous artists who used math in their work.
I had her do some research projects based off of that.
That led us into talking about math in nature.
The math minded people who were listening.
Of course we know all about cauliflower, the way the cactus grows, sunflower seeds, things
of this nature that can be a really good access point.
And then for Betty I would assign her homework based in photography where she had to take
the things we had talked about and go around the house, around the neighborhood to her
favorite local park, and find images that represented the math we had talked about.
And then she had to bring back her photography and we could talk about it then and extend
that into our next mathematical lesson.
She right away took to this very well.
She was excited to do this kind of homework.
It did not feel like homework.
It felt like something she was excited to go do.
It was a nice thing for the family to do together and to talk about at the end of the day.
She was able to talk about the math we had discussed and how it related to the images
she chose to take pictures of.
She also created a field journal for herself where she would sketch things and bring them
to me and say, is this math?
I would say absolutely and we would talk about how and why and pattern recognition and fractals
and really higher end conversations about math concepts.
Note that at this time we have not even started talking about numbers.
We had not picked up a calculator and we had not looked at a worksheet since she was in
a homeschool environment.
And since her parents had exhausted every other pathway they were open to anything that
would help their daughter feel more comfortable.
That was very lucky for me and for Betty because it let us have the room to establish positive
experience around math, which is something this poor child had not had in five years
or more.
So establishing that kind of positive experience was crucial.
Once we had done a few art related projects and once I had let Betty take the reins, make
her own choices for what represented the information she learned from our conversations, then I
could talk to her and tell her about how great she was as a mathematical thinker.
This was a term no one had ever applied to her in her life and she certainly had not
applied it to herself.
And I was able to say, look at what you chose.
Look at the patterns you picked out.
Look at how you were able to use this image and describe to me the math behind it and
retain what we talked about before.
That is absolutely mathematical thinking.
Well now she had a new name for herself and new feelings about math and now we could come
back around to the numeracy, which is such a small slice of math.
But it's the one that we obsess over, especially in elementary and the beginnings of middle
school.
So we got back around to numbers.
We talked about them very gently.
We talked about them on a grade level status.
We did not go back to the beginning.
It's very important that students with dyscalculia are doing grade level work and we use support
tools to support them in any foundational weaknesses they have, but we give them grade level work.
The main thing that stops students from being successful in elementary school when they have
dyscalculia is that dyscalculia trifecta I've talked about before.
Time, money, place, value.
Well that goes away.
We don't talk about those things after we get into middle school.
And we certainly don't talk about them at all once we get into high school.
So we let that go and we use support tools like time tables charts, time tables list,
which personally I prefer over the chart for students with dyscalculia and using a calculator.
Using a calculator will never just give students with dyscalculia the answer without them doing
any work.
Students with dyscalculia are desperate to understand what's going on.
They want to know the right answer.
They want to know the concepts and they want to know how to problem solve.
So for them, using the calculator lets them confirm a right answer, get rid of an incorrect
answer.
That's a great podcast topic, how that works for the brain, that immediate confirmation.
We'll definitely talk about that soon.
And it lets them get the answer right, feel that sense of accomplishment while they're
learning the different formulas and while they're learning the rules.
There was a lot of work we had to do about turning improper fractions into mixed numbers
and back again.
What were the rules of working with fractions for adding and subtracting and multiplying
and dividing and why are they different?
And we were able to do that with accuracy by using the calculator and that really helped
her progress.
Well moving forward, I worked with Betty as a homeschool student for about two and a half
years and this school year, beginning now in 2022, she felt ready to go back to a brick
and mortar traditional school to begin her high school journey.
We had a lot of talks about this situation at the end of the year.
We talked about what she could do over the summer, which I asked her to please take a
break and do something fun and have a great time and not worry about it because the first
couple of weeks of school were going to be a review anyway and to give herself some breathing
room to celebrate that she was even ready to take this step.
We talked about how some topics were going to make sense and some were not and that's
perfectly fine and absolutely normal for every student regardless of having dyscalculia or
not having dyscalculia.
We talked about how sometimes she would struggle and we talked about the resources she could
use to work through those times, including me.
If she ever wants to call and have a quick tutoring session or a few to get through a
unit that would always be available to her and we talked about all the other resources
at her disposal that she could use in addition to that.
We talked about the self-advocacy piece, how she could explain her learning disability
to her teacher, how she could explain the best ways for her to learn and remember and
perform on a test to her teacher.
We talked about how the teacher has final say in the classroom so some accommodations
and interventions would be acceptable, some might not and what she could do in each of
those cases.
Well, we're about a month into the school year now.
I have not heard from Betty.
I did hear from her mom and her mom sent me a screenshot of the grade book from Betty's
new school.
Well, she's in ninth grade, Algebra I and she's doing grade level work and the grade
book is full of 10 out of 10 for homework, 10 out of 10 for classwork, 10 out of 10 for
the next homework, 23 out of 25 for a quiz, 10 out of 10 for her math notebook.
It was great.
It was such a wonderful thing to see and so of course I sent back some.
Very excited congratulatory messages and told them to please keep me updated throughout
the year but I'm just so pleased that she started off strong and she is thrilled and
feels very accomplished.
I'm sure that she will run into times where she struggles and she'll run into times where
she doesn't do very well on the homework.
I'm quite sure that at some point she'll probably fail a test because that's human.
We all have periods of time like that and we all have topics that are harder than others.
She will also have many more times where she's getting those 10s out of 10s where the topic
does make sense where maybe she has to ask a few more questions but she can get it figured
out.
In most of her quizzes and tests she's going to do very well on and she's going to do just
fine with this class.
I'm so glad that we were able to take the time to step back for a year or two, change
her experience with math, change her definition of self as a mathematical thinker, find the
right support tools and now she's been able to transition back into the right place for
her which is a brick and mortar school with her peers and I think she's going to do great.
If you're listening and you have students with dyscalculia, children with dyscalculia
or you yourself have dyscalculia, just know that if you're still struggling it's because
you haven't figured out the right path yet.
You don't have the right support tools in place yet but you absolutely can.
Getting into your own as a mathematical thinker and performing math very well in a variety
of circumstances is absolutely something you can attain.
When we're working with students who have dyscalculia of any age or grade level we need
to make sure first of all that we acknowledge where they've been and how they feel about
math when they first meet us.
We have to establish second of all what are some shared goals so we know what to work toward.
We have to find any method we can to make a successful math experience and then we build
off of that.
We do grade level work using the right support tools and the right accommodations and you
will be amazed at the amount of growth and how much it sticks.
I'm excited to share more success stories like that in future podcasts but right now
I'm going to go enjoy some of Betty's artwork that she has sent to me in the past and enjoy
the great work she's doing today.
If you'd like more information about anything I've said in today's podcast or the work I
do with students please reach out to me.
You can email me Honora at educalclearning.com that's H-O-N-O-R-A.
Go to my website educalclearning.com and reach me through there.
You can find me on LinkedIn.
Educalc Learning has a Facebook page and you can also look up our courses.
I should be launching the certificate program level one certification for teaching students
with dyscalculia very soon.
Right now I'm recording this at the beginning of September 2022 so that level one certification
should be rolling out by the end of the month.
If you'd like to get more information on the front end or put your name on a mailing
list for interest reach out to me and check out the website because I put as much free
information up there as I possibly can as well.
Thank you for listening to What in the World is Dyscalculia.
I hope you enjoyed the story of Betty.
I certainly enjoy her story very much and I will talk with you soon.
Thanks for listening.