Accommodations and Skill Substitution for the Numbers

New Scientist ran an exciting (to me) article on Why some people can't put two and two together, which is about dyscalculia, the number counterpart to dyslexia. This article fascinated me (so much that I stole this story from poor Kristina who actually found the article first) both because of my own struggles with numbers, and because it made me think about strategies for working with and around those struggles.

Specific learning disabilities like dyscalculia are not part of any ASD DSM diagnostic criteria, but individuals on the spectrum often have specific learning disabilities or uneven skills. Kristina posted about Doin' the Math earlier this week, and I confess that, while I am decades older, and have decades more schooling, I still do my arithmetic the same way Kristina's son does--with a calculator and little fondness.

My history with math is bizarre. Even fast approaching middle age, I still can't add single digit numbers or count change, and my scores on arithmetic-oriented IQ subtests are on the way left side of the bell curve. And oh yes I spent many frustrated hours in the "low" math groups in grade school without learning a thing. But--I actually understood imaginary numbers when my age was still expressed by a single digit, I was on my middle school math team, and I have aced graduate level mathematics courses. I don't have a "problem with math" conceptually, but I do have a profound inability to cope, specifically, with numbers. I can explain exactly why addition works starting from first principles, but I can't actually do addition problems.

I have managed to fool a lot of people into thinking I have more than a second grade (which is perhaps generous) capacity for arithmetic by substituting my mutant power capacity for math-as-pattern. "Give me thirty cents," someone says, and yes, given a little extra time, I do hand the thirty cents over. But I didn't use any numbers to do so. I have memorized the different combinations of coins that map to the phrase "thirty cents."

I can't say that my workarounds--a combination of calculators as accommodations and memorizing patterns as skill substitution--are equal to the ability to actually conceptualize numbers. Even with a calculator, I have to enter the numbers repeatedly until I end up with the same result more than once. I need someone else to do my finances and make sure I haven't done something stupid with time. But when possible, I have found I can use the sort of math I'm good at--patterns and relationships--to accomplish stuff, like program a computer to do my arithmetic for me. And at that, well enough so that one of my teachers was convinced for a while that I was "good with numbers." (I thought he might faint when he discovered during a conversation with me that I am quite entirely unable to figure out the answer to "what is 1000 times two.")