Hello and welcome to the What in the World is Dyscalculia podcast.
This podcast is presented by Educalc Learning and I am your host, Dr. Honora Wall.
And today I wanted to talk about my first math student.
I had a parent ask me recently how I got started in this work and what made me focus
on dyscalculia and students who are really struggling.
And I thought about my students, current students and a few years back students and the first
one diagnosed with dyscalculia and using that understanding to think about students I worked
with before I had ever heard of this math learning disability.
But honestly the more I went back I realized that my first math student was me.
The first person I worked with who had no math experience and a terrible attitude about
themselves as a mathematical thinker was myself.
The story is that I was an adult, I had two kids, I was going through a divorce and I realized
that I needed to take control of my finances, my taxes honestly were the catalyst.
I needed to do my own taxes and that meant I needed to understand my finances and that
meant I needed to do math.
And this brought up an absolute panic.
I had never been seen as a good math student in school.
I do not have dyscalculia because my understanding of time and working with money and directions
is fine and my ability to retain math information I've learned over time is fine.
So those are some of the signs that I know I don't have dyscalculia.
However my anxiety and really trauma from my K-12 math experiences was so intense that
the idea of getting into math in any way shape or form was overwhelming.
My oldest child was in fourth grade at the time.
So I took his previous textbook, third grade math textbook, we still had lying around the
house that we had not returned to the school yet.
And I said that's it, I'm just going to fix this.
I am too old to still have this hanging over me and I'm going to jump in and just figure
this out.
So I sat down with page one of that math textbook and I started working my way through it.
I would love to tell you it was super easy and painless and next thing you knew I was
doing math like a genius but that would not be a true story at all.
It took a very long time mostly because I would cry.
As I was working it was such an emotionally charged experience.
I think that's something a lot of teachers and sometimes parents don't really understand.
For students who are struggling it's very emotionally distressing to feel like there's
something that you keep working at and you just can't do it.
Today when I'm working with students of any age that emotional piece is something we absolutely
address.
There's a lot of positive reinforcement, there's a lot of reframing, belief systems, there
is a lot of psychology involved in this work.
Now for a general education teacher not specializing in learning disabilities you might not have
to incorporate that kind of social emotional learning and that sort of understanding of
psychology into your work.
I would encourage you to try it because I think you'll be amazed for any and all students
how much a little bit of positive reinforcement really focusing on their successes and reframing
their belief systems can increase their performance in your class and throughout all of their other
classes because we all need to feel like we can be successful.
So when I was going through this math book in the beginning I was not feeling successful.
I really had to work to feel that this was something I could do.
A lot of it came through practice problems, doing them over and over again.
The instructions in the textbooks sometimes helped, sometimes didn't.
This was before YouTube and before the plethora of resources that we have today.
But I struggled through.
And two things happened.
When I would answer a math problem correctly and think to myself well that's got to be
the wrong answer because I figured it out pretty fast and it seemed easy.
And then I would look and it was the right answer.
And I would say wait a second what just happened?
All I did was make this one small change and everything clicked and now it's right.
I have to tell you my initial emotion at that point in time was anger.
A lot of anger and irritation at every math teacher I had had in my life because no one
ever said oh you know what you're doing this and just do that instead.
If someone had seen exactly where my mistakes were, pointed them out and corrected me right
away.
It could have been an entirely different story and I could have been helping more students
from a much earlier point in time.
So that is my second message to my fellow educators.
First is you've got to really address that positive psychology and that emotional piece.
It means more than you know.
And second you've got to really look and see what your students are doing and tell them
oh you're doing this and I just want you to do that instead.
Little tiny tweaks make all of the difference.
The same way a very small difference in slope creates an entirely different line.
Over time a small change in slope creates an entirely different graphed line.
And over time fixing or not fixing small mistakes makes an incredibly huge difference in math
performance.
So those were the first two things that I found.
One was that I needed to work through the emotions of all of the negative math experiences
I had had and I do find that to be very true with my students today.
We have to do that piece because they really beat themselves up and have a lot of self-blame
over their math performance and we have to address that.
The second thing is that fixing the mistakes was much easier than I thought it was going
to be.
And never having someone look closely at what I was doing and fix my mistakes when I was
younger made a negative difference in all of my math performance until I got in there
and fixed those mistakes.
So the sooner you can really sit down with a student in the classroom or in a tutoring
experience or when you're taking students out for intervention time, really looking
at exactly what they're doing, having them explain their steps to you so you can see
where they go off the rails and then getting them back on track.
That little tiny bit of work, that's where all of the future mastery comes from.
That's how I've been able to take students and raise them through three years of math
and get them on a grade level work because we fixed the tiny things and then their foundation
was truly solid.
That's how I've been able to take students who have had very low standardized test scores
and within one year of working with them, their scores on national standardized math
test increase.
And I'm not usually there when my students are taking these other tests.
I work with students in the classroom teaching remotely and I work with students in a tutoring
session.
But when they take their math tests, either in the classroom or state mandated test, Iowa
test of basic skills, SAT and ACT test, I'm nowhere near.
They're doing all of that work on their own and I've seen the success translate into those
test taking situations.
So don't obsess about the test performance.
I know that's hard because as educators that's where we get a lot of our performance evaluations
from, how are our students testing.
But if you want that kind of result, you don't look at that part.
You go back to the individual performance and the small areas where students are off track.
Fix those and you'll see huge differences elsewhere.
And then the third thing that happened to me as I was going through this process was
that I was fixing my belief system.
I was experiencing success.
I was surprised at how easily I was starting to get things and then I came to word problems.
I am not afraid or ashamed to tell you that I had a huge setback when I started to teach
myself how to deal with word problems.
There were weeks of tears and hours of sitting with elementary school textbooks.
And facing those word problems was daunting.
And I'm a big reader.
I love reading.
I always have.
But man, did I hate those word problems.
And figuring out what the question was asking of me was very difficult.
And changing my understanding of myself as a person who could approach a word problem
in math was very difficult.
I'm happy to say I pushed through.
They were a terrible couple of weeks.
It was really awful.
But I persevered.
I made it out the other side.
And now there's not a word problem that ever gets in my way.
And I'm able to break them down for my students.
Say OK, what does this question want from you?
Let's find that.
When do we know about this question?
What's missing?
How are we going to work this out?
And talking about those word problems to really help students find success.
I've seen a big change in math textbooks over time as I've been an educator.
And a lot of it is in this area of word problems.
If you really work through those with your students, the vocabulary that's used in a
lot of materials is completely inappropriate as far as using vocabulary words and sentence
structure that sounds rigorous to adults but makes hardly any sense.
Sometimes no sense at all to students.
It's an external barrier we put in place that keeps a lot of our students from getting
the right answer to word problems that they otherwise would know exactly what to do.
So for me, I find that in my work, I'll spend a lot of time pointing out to students what
they already know.
So we'll be inside of a word problem and we'll really pick apart, okay, you know this is
the topic, you know this is what they want you to find.
This is what you know about finding that answer.
Now let's take that and see if we can apply any of it to the rest of what's happening
in this word problem.
So moving them out of the word problem itself, getting them into a place of mastery in their
own mind and then taking that knowledge you've activated going back to the word problem and
seeing where it fits.
That's been a really useful tool to help students understand word problems.
And for me that word problem piece was set back on my journey to really seeing myself
as a mathematical thinker.
So it was worth it for me to push through that very painful trying experience and it's
helped me when I work with my students now and I see them facing a setback and I see
them getting to whatever part of math is their particular emotional struggle and talking
them through that letting them know that we're going to get to the other side together and
helping them create that bridge.
As they've crossed that bridge and they felt some success and they've unlocked the secret
of what they're doing wrong, there's really no stopping them.
I've seen so many students take off as mathematical thinkers and finding academic success and
once they get a taste of it, they're not going back.
It's really a nice thing to see.
The other piece that I had to do for myself as my first math student was to keep that
door open.
Once I had figured out that I really could do math and I figured out how to do math and
I figured out what I had been doing wrong and what had been in my way in the past, once
I changed my belief system about myself as a math person, then I had to keep that door
open.
I had to look for more math challenges.
I learned to find resources that worked best for me and not all of them are perfect for
all students, the same way not all teachers are the right teacher for every student.
It would be exhausting if you had to be the perfect teacher for every student.
It would be impossible to create one material or one resource that would be perfect for
all students and that's fine.
Some beings are very different people, of course, we think differently, learn differently,
understand differently and we need different resources for that very reason.
So learning to look at resources with an eye for my best way of understanding was my next
and final piece because now I had something I could take with me into all future math
experiences and other parts of life as well.
So learning about myself as a student really helped me in all areas to learn how to find
the best resources for myself, how to find the best way of learning for myself, how to
analyze where I was off track and get myself back on track.
All of those components are the strategies and tools we want to use with our students.
When you're working with students who have dyscalculia, you're going to find that they
have a lot of emotional baggage tied to their math experiences.
Don't shy away from it.
Get in there, address it, acknowledge it, help them change those belief systems.
You're going to find that for students with dyscalculia, there are one or two things
that are very small that they're doing wrong.
In them, look for them, point them out, stop and sit in that moment of that tiny mistake
until you fix it.
And once you know the student has fixed that piece and has a solid mastery of it, then
you can move on.
I do not mean that students need to be doing grade level work below the grade level that
they're in before they can move on.
I do not think students have to master, let's say, the two's times tables or those crazy
worksheets before they're allowed to do the next level of math work.
I'm saying that in your individual sessions discussing a problem with a student, find
the mistake in that one problem and don't let those go.
But regardless of how a student with dyscalculia is performing with that dyscalculia trifecta,
or regardless of how many times they're forgetting the basic facts that they've learned already,
that's fine.
We use external support so that they can find their mastery, so that they can fix their
mistakes, so that they have precision and accuracy.
So don't sit with a topic that you don't use a support tool for.
If you're fixing mistakes, use external support systems, that's going to develop the mastery,
and then your students will be fine doing grade level work.
Also for students with dyscalculia, make sure you let them know that they truly are mathematical
thinkers already.
The part of math that they're struggling with is the part that sits well in a K-12 container.
And that's really what we want to address for these students.
Because once we do, they find success in math classes without our help.
They can truly move on because they know how they best learn and what kind of support tools
they need to find their own success.
Thinking back to myself as my first math student, that was a long time ago.
I'm so glad that I went through that process, although it was very painful at the time.
But I'm glad that I did because it's opened up a whole world of succeeding in math, having
my career based in math, and helping other people find that success much earlier than
I did.
So that is my final message in this story, is that no matter how old a person is, if
you are listening to this and you are an adult in the workplace and you feel like your dyscalculia
is holding you back, it can still be fixed, you can turn that around.
If you are seeing your student, if you are the parent or the teacher and you are thinking
oh no, they are moving ahead and the math is not moving ahead, what's going to happen
in the future, everything can be fixed.
And their math experience can be entirely different.
Moving ahead.
Whatever experiences you have had in math in the past, you don't have to continue those
in the future.
You can have whatever math future you want to have.
And it really can be very life changing.
Certainly for me it was life changing the way I thought of myself as a person and it
changed my entire career and my study.
Changed me as a student, sent me back into school, now I have a doctorate in curriculum
and instruction because this has become such a passion.
So take the lesson of addressing the emotional piece, fixing the small mistakes before they
continue, changing the mindset about yourself as a math learner, use whatever resources
and support systems are appropriate for you and then nothing can hold you back.
Thank you for listening to my story of how I helped my first math student who was myself.
I'm Dr. Honora Wall, I can be reached at Honora H-O-N-O-R-A at educalclearning.com.
Please visit our website educalclearning.com and check out our Dyscalculia Specialist Certification
Program.
Very excited to have that launched and available for you.
And if you would like to know more about dyscalculia, please contact us.
And I look forward to helping you on your journey through this math learning disability.