First published Monday,
26 April 2010
Early
yesterday morning I arrived at the dentist's flossed, brushed and
gleaming for my appointment in two weeks' time. The receptionist
puzzled awhile over the list of patients for the day, before
inputting my data and finally explaining a little too gently that my
appointment was on Wed 28th, not Wed 14th. 'OK, no problem,' I
beamed, 'see you in a couple of weeks then' and made my way back
outside to await a bus home in the wind and rain.
The days when I would have tried to explain in flustered apology why I'd turned up on the wrong date were long since gone, though inwardly I was fuming at yet another morning of my life wasted in this fashion. Over the years, I've sent birthday gifts and cards a month early or late, missed important appointments by a week and once arrived at hospital packed and ready for an operation a full two months ahead of schedule. Only a few weeks ago I had my family in fits by innocently asking what date Christmas Eve is. I'm never sure what age I am and forget the answer within seconds of working it out.
I have dyscalculia. To anyone unfamiliar with the term, it means that I am dyslexic with numbers. They make almost no sense to my brain - never have done, and never will.
Dyscalculia has only recently been addressed by the teaching profession as a cognitive disorder in its own right; I only wish that this knowledge had been around when I was at school…the powerful connection I now have between maths and corporal punishment has left a lasting association in my unconscious mind.
The days when I would have tried to explain in flustered apology why I'd turned up on the wrong date were long since gone, though inwardly I was fuming at yet another morning of my life wasted in this fashion. Over the years, I've sent birthday gifts and cards a month early or late, missed important appointments by a week and once arrived at hospital packed and ready for an operation a full two months ahead of schedule. Only a few weeks ago I had my family in fits by innocently asking what date Christmas Eve is. I'm never sure what age I am and forget the answer within seconds of working it out.
I have dyscalculia. To anyone unfamiliar with the term, it means that I am dyslexic with numbers. They make almost no sense to my brain - never have done, and never will.
Dyscalculia has only recently been addressed by the teaching profession as a cognitive disorder in its own right; I only wish that this knowledge had been around when I was at school…the powerful connection I now have between maths and corporal punishment has left a lasting association in my unconscious mind.
Over
the years I've evolved various resourceful methods to help me live
in a numbers-based world, and the invention of the pocket calculator
in the mid 70's did much to improve my quality of life, but
day-to-day living is still fraught with problems.
People initially think I must be very stupid and once they've realised that this might not actually be the case assume I must therefore be either too lazy to acquire mathematical skills - "if you really want to learn it, you will, you just need to try harder" - or in possession of some kind of ditzy, ’girlish’ affectation. If those who judged us so harshly actually became aware of the depths of embarrassment to which the dyscalculic person is frequently subject, or the sheer amount of time we spend creating complex coping strategies for this frightening maths and commerce-oriented culture, they would probably be very surprised.
Dyscalculia affects not just a person's competence to process number, but also several other related fields which can include co-ordination, comprehension of direction, distance, left and right, memorisation of game rules, date and time recognition and measurement, accurate name and face recall and the ability to learn sequences of movement.
Whilst the child who struggles with numeracy is given some small social leeway, the adult who frequently makes 'childlike' mistakes both in speech and action comes up against a far less forgiving world. I've learned to join in with the general amusement that erupts whenever I fail to recognise a close acquaintance or apply the wrong name to someone I've known for twenty years and to shoulder full responsibility for every mess-up involving times or dates, but deep down inside something silently cringes under the blows of each additional mishap.
Remember that moment each January when you first go to write out the date after the New Year - a part of you wants to write the familiar number of the year just gone? A brief mental struggle ensues in a sort of grey Limbo as you update your brain to the change of digit. The first couple of times you write the new date feel a little weird but you quickly get the hang of it. Well for me, that initial moment of confusion - when the meaning of the symbols by which we measure our reality seems temporarily dissolved and fluid - is my permanent state. I live right there, in that soup of numeric weirdness. Most people have a kind of mental blackboard they can write on to perform calculations. I have one too, it's just that the digits don't stick to it. If I try to mentally multiply 24 X 5 right now for example, I hear 'five-fours-are-twenty' and can put 0 in the 'totals box' beneath and just about carry the wriggling 2 (even though it's starting to fragment) to leave nearby...but now as I look back at the board for the next bit I see that it has wiped itself clean, and when I return to the totals box there's nothing there either, and already I cannot clearly recall the sum. Something about 25, yes?
If I have to count a lot of things, I do so under my breath in chanted groups of four, curling a finger under my palm for each completed group of eight, because there is no memorable rhythm to 10 and I get lost very fast. Even so I sometimes forget to include the number 15 which causes no end of muddle.
For me there is no safety in numbers: they are fishy, slippery, unreliable things with a life all their own. I've learnt to say that 'three from eight equals five' but between you and me, I'm not convinced, since if you count down three digits like this: 8, 7, 6, the answer could well be the end one, 6. If you're not going to include the 6, you shouldn't logically include the 8 either. Therefore 8 - 3 might really be 6, 5 or even 4. To navigate this kind of low-level arithmetic in situations where a calculator would be useless - such as whilst knitting or weaving for example - I often resort to two plates and transfer small objects from one to the other to mark each row. When shopping I struggle long and hard to tell whether '1 kg potatoes for £1.50' is better value than '1 kg at £2.50 Buy-One-Get-One-Free' and frequently pick up the more expensive one with the lower figure, convinced I've got a bargain. I'm pleasantly surprised to receive change from a £5 note for four items costing 99p each but conversely experience disappointment when said fiver fails to cover a £5.49 purchase.
Dyscalculia impacts into so many areas of daily life, and the worst part is never knowing - despite all one’s precautions - where it will strike next.
People initially think I must be very stupid and once they've realised that this might not actually be the case assume I must therefore be either too lazy to acquire mathematical skills - "if you really want to learn it, you will, you just need to try harder" - or in possession of some kind of ditzy, ’girlish’ affectation. If those who judged us so harshly actually became aware of the depths of embarrassment to which the dyscalculic person is frequently subject, or the sheer amount of time we spend creating complex coping strategies for this frightening maths and commerce-oriented culture, they would probably be very surprised.
Dyscalculia affects not just a person's competence to process number, but also several other related fields which can include co-ordination, comprehension of direction, distance, left and right, memorisation of game rules, date and time recognition and measurement, accurate name and face recall and the ability to learn sequences of movement.
Whilst the child who struggles with numeracy is given some small social leeway, the adult who frequently makes 'childlike' mistakes both in speech and action comes up against a far less forgiving world. I've learned to join in with the general amusement that erupts whenever I fail to recognise a close acquaintance or apply the wrong name to someone I've known for twenty years and to shoulder full responsibility for every mess-up involving times or dates, but deep down inside something silently cringes under the blows of each additional mishap.
Remember that moment each January when you first go to write out the date after the New Year - a part of you wants to write the familiar number of the year just gone? A brief mental struggle ensues in a sort of grey Limbo as you update your brain to the change of digit. The first couple of times you write the new date feel a little weird but you quickly get the hang of it. Well for me, that initial moment of confusion - when the meaning of the symbols by which we measure our reality seems temporarily dissolved and fluid - is my permanent state. I live right there, in that soup of numeric weirdness. Most people have a kind of mental blackboard they can write on to perform calculations. I have one too, it's just that the digits don't stick to it. If I try to mentally multiply 24 X 5 right now for example, I hear 'five-fours-are-twenty' and can put 0 in the 'totals box' beneath and just about carry the wriggling 2 (even though it's starting to fragment) to leave nearby...but now as I look back at the board for the next bit I see that it has wiped itself clean, and when I return to the totals box there's nothing there either, and already I cannot clearly recall the sum. Something about 25, yes?
If I have to count a lot of things, I do so under my breath in chanted groups of four, curling a finger under my palm for each completed group of eight, because there is no memorable rhythm to 10 and I get lost very fast. Even so I sometimes forget to include the number 15 which causes no end of muddle.
For me there is no safety in numbers: they are fishy, slippery, unreliable things with a life all their own. I've learnt to say that 'three from eight equals five' but between you and me, I'm not convinced, since if you count down three digits like this: 8, 7, 6, the answer could well be the end one, 6. If you're not going to include the 6, you shouldn't logically include the 8 either. Therefore 8 - 3 might really be 6, 5 or even 4. To navigate this kind of low-level arithmetic in situations where a calculator would be useless - such as whilst knitting or weaving for example - I often resort to two plates and transfer small objects from one to the other to mark each row. When shopping I struggle long and hard to tell whether '1 kg potatoes for £1.50' is better value than '1 kg at £2.50 Buy-One-Get-One-Free' and frequently pick up the more expensive one with the lower figure, convinced I've got a bargain. I'm pleasantly surprised to receive change from a £5 note for four items costing 99p each but conversely experience disappointment when said fiver fails to cover a £5.49 purchase.
Dyscalculia impacts into so many areas of daily life, and the worst part is never knowing - despite all one’s precautions - where it will strike next.
My
landline phone has to have a large capacity to store contacts,
because otherwise it takes four or five attempts - not to mention
some increasingly irate householders taking my 'wrong number' calls
- to dial out a single sequence in the right order, since
transposition of number is the norm for dyscalculics. If I have to
memorise a series of numbers for any reason I sing them, over and
over until they can be written down. I don't dare own a credit card,
cannot grasp the concepts behind Sudoku and am frequently unable to
tell whether or not I'm winning a game of online Scrabble, even
though the scores are visible side by side. Being told that
something is six hundred yards away doesn't bring to mind any
meaningful pictures of distance. If you ask me to select 'the second
item on the left' I won't know where to begin to find it, and if you
try and explain I may start to panic slightly. Take me for a driving
lesson and you'll probably want a stiff drink afterwards.
When I'm not drastically early I tend toward pathological lateness as the passage of time is difficult to for me to assess with any degree of accuracy. A circular clock face is easier to read than the digital kind but calculating what time one needs to leave somewhere in order to catch a bus involves drawing an imaginary line across the dial from the time of the bus, and mentally blocking out all the minutes following up to the 12. Using circular anticlockwise finger movements I then calculate backwards (towards 'now') each incremental group of five-minutes to which I've designated walking there, saying my goodbyes, getting coat and bag etc., all accompanied by under-the-breath whispers as I try to memorize the sequence, since if I get distracted I'll lose all the information and have to start from scratch. A day, a week, a month and a year all have to be treated in the same way for me to have any hope of meeting social obligations. If you say 'See you Wednesday week' I will probably have to ask you what day that is before I can grasp it, and if you shout 'It's effing Wednesday, innit, you div' our friendship may be short-lived.
I attended weekly Tai Chi classes for almost three years, but thanks to the inability to memorise sequences of movement I knew no more on my last day there than on my first. I play a mean game of poker, but even after four years still need the rules written out beside me. I can usually memorise a song, melody or poem after a couple of hearings and a gripping scene from a film or novel in one, but despite countless attempts have never been able to read written music.
One of the most puzzling things for a person with dyscalculia is the fact that some days are very much better than others. On a good day I can do simple arithmetic and recall someone's name within a few minutes of thinking about it. On a bad day (such as yesterday) I wonder whether I'm actually developing Alzheimers without noticing, and everyone's simply being too polite to tell me - or worse - they’ve told me but I've already forgotten!
The cause may be genetic since to some extent both my mother and sister shared this lack of facility with number, and within my immediate family at least I suffered no undue pressure on account of it. There were just some things we could not do well, and - with the exception of the household accounts - we avoided those activities as much as possible, concentrating our energies instead on those in which we excelled. Interestingly, both my son and his father have a high aptitude for maths, so perhaps some kind of unconscious natural selection was at play there.
My mother had taught me to read and write by the time I started school aged four, and I coped reasonably well until the introduction of multiplication a year later. I remember the lesson as if it were yesterday, the wizened and incredulous face of Sister Mary Aloysius pushing into mine as she explained over and over in increasing volume that two TIMES two was four. I just couldn't grasp it. 'Two times two' looked exactly the same as 'two plus two'. That lunchtime my backside received its first taste of her leather belt as I failed to deliver any work to my maths book. Division a couple of weeks later wasn't much better: a picture of a cake with slices being taken out to be conceptually distributed around the classroom looked no different to 'taking away'. All around me my classmates seemed to be suddenly running with ideas and answers the meaning of which eluded me. Something was clearly amiss. Multiplication and division towered over my desk like invisible, unassailable mountains. After a year of anxiety and struggle I managed to get some kind of crude working model of these concepts fixed in my mind during which brief hiatus my self confidence was restored. Very slowly however, my classmates began to overtake me whilst I stayed where I was, trapped with the maths facility of a 6 year old, unable to progress my ideas. Things went pretty much downhill from there. My teachers punished me for 'laziness' and I in turn grew to detest school and anything to do with Maths or Sport.
Although I got on well with my peers, my popularity was never a match for the spirit of competition and games lessons became a nightmare when week after week I found myself one of the last picked for a team (amidst groans of team dismay) often only just before the person who smelled and talked to herself at lunchtime and the girl who couldn't run because she wore callipers. The reason for this was very simple: I was a total liability. I could never understand the rules, nor which team I was playing for - tending to enthusiastically throw the ball to a member of the opposition if they shouted loudly enough for it - and when a ball was hurled in my direction I generally ducked. In the whole of my school career I managed to strike a ball just twice (oh joy!) but only because a friendly bowler ordered me to hold the bat still whilst they aimed at it.
The confusion I experience around number is further exacerbated by the fact that I am synaesthetic. This term means that a person experiences a cross-over in one or more of their senses, for example words and sounds and even ideas can have a corresponding subjective colour, shape, texture, taste, sensation or position in one's mental space. Consequently I experience much of reality as relationships, sensations, and colour.
When I think of the dates around Christmas for example, ‘December’ is black. '25' Is hard, dark green, mid-level distant and means "sealed secrets", whilst '24' hangs at shoulder-level, denotes "endings" and being black and thin doesn't really show up against 'December'. '23' However is gold, white and pink, means "possibilities" and "blossom" and hovers around my forehead. To me therefore, 23rd December is the 'best' date, and the most likely candidate for Christmas Eve, because it makes the dark, 'invisible' 24th December that 'non-day' - the date of which we never write - Christmas Day. Obviously this clashes a bit with other people's plans, with the result that I have no firm, working grasp of what dates constitute Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
My problem with the dental appointment yesterday is that having had to cancel it twice in the past month, it had been consigned, much like Christmas Eve, to my mental stew. Add to this a new wall calendar which now starts on a Sunday instead of Monday and signifies the weekdays by a tiny single lowercase letter and you will see that it actually makes no difference to me whether today is the 14th or 28th: they are all equally meaningless. One is dark purple, exciting and means "stars", the other is black and red and means "the horses" - neither of them however mean 'now' or 'dental appointment'.
I hope that the next time you're stuck in a checkout queue behind some feckless individual shakily tipping out their purse contents on the counter in a clatter of rolling coins for the cashier to count, you'll remember this blog and think twice before you judge them too harshly. After all, chances are it's probably me!
When I'm not drastically early I tend toward pathological lateness as the passage of time is difficult to for me to assess with any degree of accuracy. A circular clock face is easier to read than the digital kind but calculating what time one needs to leave somewhere in order to catch a bus involves drawing an imaginary line across the dial from the time of the bus, and mentally blocking out all the minutes following up to the 12. Using circular anticlockwise finger movements I then calculate backwards (towards 'now') each incremental group of five-minutes to which I've designated walking there, saying my goodbyes, getting coat and bag etc., all accompanied by under-the-breath whispers as I try to memorize the sequence, since if I get distracted I'll lose all the information and have to start from scratch. A day, a week, a month and a year all have to be treated in the same way for me to have any hope of meeting social obligations. If you say 'See you Wednesday week' I will probably have to ask you what day that is before I can grasp it, and if you shout 'It's effing Wednesday, innit, you div' our friendship may be short-lived.
I attended weekly Tai Chi classes for almost three years, but thanks to the inability to memorise sequences of movement I knew no more on my last day there than on my first. I play a mean game of poker, but even after four years still need the rules written out beside me. I can usually memorise a song, melody or poem after a couple of hearings and a gripping scene from a film or novel in one, but despite countless attempts have never been able to read written music.
One of the most puzzling things for a person with dyscalculia is the fact that some days are very much better than others. On a good day I can do simple arithmetic and recall someone's name within a few minutes of thinking about it. On a bad day (such as yesterday) I wonder whether I'm actually developing Alzheimers without noticing, and everyone's simply being too polite to tell me - or worse - they’ve told me but I've already forgotten!
The cause may be genetic since to some extent both my mother and sister shared this lack of facility with number, and within my immediate family at least I suffered no undue pressure on account of it. There were just some things we could not do well, and - with the exception of the household accounts - we avoided those activities as much as possible, concentrating our energies instead on those in which we excelled. Interestingly, both my son and his father have a high aptitude for maths, so perhaps some kind of unconscious natural selection was at play there.
My mother had taught me to read and write by the time I started school aged four, and I coped reasonably well until the introduction of multiplication a year later. I remember the lesson as if it were yesterday, the wizened and incredulous face of Sister Mary Aloysius pushing into mine as she explained over and over in increasing volume that two TIMES two was four. I just couldn't grasp it. 'Two times two' looked exactly the same as 'two plus two'. That lunchtime my backside received its first taste of her leather belt as I failed to deliver any work to my maths book. Division a couple of weeks later wasn't much better: a picture of a cake with slices being taken out to be conceptually distributed around the classroom looked no different to 'taking away'. All around me my classmates seemed to be suddenly running with ideas and answers the meaning of which eluded me. Something was clearly amiss. Multiplication and division towered over my desk like invisible, unassailable mountains. After a year of anxiety and struggle I managed to get some kind of crude working model of these concepts fixed in my mind during which brief hiatus my self confidence was restored. Very slowly however, my classmates began to overtake me whilst I stayed where I was, trapped with the maths facility of a 6 year old, unable to progress my ideas. Things went pretty much downhill from there. My teachers punished me for 'laziness' and I in turn grew to detest school and anything to do with Maths or Sport.
Although I got on well with my peers, my popularity was never a match for the spirit of competition and games lessons became a nightmare when week after week I found myself one of the last picked for a team (amidst groans of team dismay) often only just before the person who smelled and talked to herself at lunchtime and the girl who couldn't run because she wore callipers. The reason for this was very simple: I was a total liability. I could never understand the rules, nor which team I was playing for - tending to enthusiastically throw the ball to a member of the opposition if they shouted loudly enough for it - and when a ball was hurled in my direction I generally ducked. In the whole of my school career I managed to strike a ball just twice (oh joy!) but only because a friendly bowler ordered me to hold the bat still whilst they aimed at it.
The confusion I experience around number is further exacerbated by the fact that I am synaesthetic. This term means that a person experiences a cross-over in one or more of their senses, for example words and sounds and even ideas can have a corresponding subjective colour, shape, texture, taste, sensation or position in one's mental space. Consequently I experience much of reality as relationships, sensations, and colour.
When I think of the dates around Christmas for example, ‘December’ is black. '25' Is hard, dark green, mid-level distant and means "sealed secrets", whilst '24' hangs at shoulder-level, denotes "endings" and being black and thin doesn't really show up against 'December'. '23' However is gold, white and pink, means "possibilities" and "blossom" and hovers around my forehead. To me therefore, 23rd December is the 'best' date, and the most likely candidate for Christmas Eve, because it makes the dark, 'invisible' 24th December that 'non-day' - the date of which we never write - Christmas Day. Obviously this clashes a bit with other people's plans, with the result that I have no firm, working grasp of what dates constitute Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
My problem with the dental appointment yesterday is that having had to cancel it twice in the past month, it had been consigned, much like Christmas Eve, to my mental stew. Add to this a new wall calendar which now starts on a Sunday instead of Monday and signifies the weekdays by a tiny single lowercase letter and you will see that it actually makes no difference to me whether today is the 14th or 28th: they are all equally meaningless. One is dark purple, exciting and means "stars", the other is black and red and means "the horses" - neither of them however mean 'now' or 'dental appointment'.
I hope that the next time you're stuck in a checkout queue behind some feckless individual shakily tipping out their purse contents on the counter in a clatter of rolling coins for the cashier to count, you'll remember this blog and think twice before you judge them too harshly. After all, chances are it's probably me!
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