I was a really good student.
I was also spectacularly, almost impressively bad at math.
These two facts coexisted throughout my childhood, though nobody seemed particularly interested in figuring out how or why. I was in honors English. I won writing awards. I loved books, essays, words. The more words, the better.
Math was where my academic career went to die.
I now know I have dyscalculia, a learning disability that affects how a person understands and works with numbers.
But I grew up in the 1980s and ’90s, when the word dyscalculia wasn’t exactly rolling off the tongues of the faculty at my elementary school. I was just a kid who was bad at math. And when adults don’t understand why a child is struggling, they tend to come up with explanations that have a lot more to do with the child’s character than the child’s brain.
Maybe I wasn’t paying attention. Maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough.
I was trying so hard I can still feel it. I would sit at my desk and stare at the numbers, willing them to rearrange themselves into something that made sense. They never did.
One teacher used to slam a metal ruler on my desk and bark, “Pay attention, Abrahamson!”
The class laughed. I laughed, too, because when you’re a kid and everyone is laughing at you, pretending you’re in on the joke is a pretty effective survival strategy.
The irony is that I was paying attention. I just couldn’t make sense of what I was looking at.
I couldn’t read an analog clock.
This was an especially inconvenient problem back when clocks were a fact of life, not vintage-inspired wall decor. There was no phone in your pocket to rescue you. If you wanted to know the time, you had to interpret two hands pointing at a collection of numbers. I could stare at a clock for what felt like an eternity and still have no idea whether it was 4:20, 8:20 or possibly Tuesday.
I also got lost. Constantly.
Before GPS, this was less of a quirky personality trait and more of a logistical nightmare. Maps might as well have been written in a foreign language. Other people could look at a map, trace a route with their fingers and figure out where they were going. I would look at the same map and wonder how anyone was getting anything useful out of all those lines.
Struggling with everyday numbers, from telling time to estimating quantities, is a recognized feature of dyscalculia. At the time, I just thought I was inexplicably bad at things other people seemed to know how to do without thinking.
My report card told the story of my brain years before anyone had the language to explain it: honors English, remedial math.
My parents, to their enormous credit, knew I was struggling and tried to help. They hired tutors. I had an SAT coach who became so frustrated that he more or less told my parents they were wasting their money.
I don’t blame him, exactly. He didn’t know he was looking at a learning disability. He thought he was looking at a kid who couldn’t learn math.
Michèle Mazzocco, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development and director of its Math and Numeracy Lab, has a pretty good comeback for the idea that a kid who is so strong in other subjects has no reason to struggle with math. “That’s like saying this person is so good at ballet that they should be also a good mechanical engineer,” she says. “Really different skills.”
And I didn’t know any better, either.
That may be the part that has stayed with me the longest. When you keep failing at something everyone else seems to find easy, you don’t necessarily conclude that the system has failed to understand your brain. You conclude that your brain has failed you.
I knew I was smart. My grades said so. My teachers said so. Reading and writing came naturally to me. I could win a writing award and then go home and stare at a page of numbers as if someone had handed me an ancient text and neglected to include the translation.
It was as if there were two versions of me: the smart one and the one who couldn’t do math. I spent years trying to reconcile them, never realizing they weren’t contradictory at all.
It wasn’t until much later that I learned what had been happening had a name.
Even the name is tricky. (I always manage to butcher it.) Mazzocco says dis-kal-KYOO-lee-uh, putting the emphasis on the same syllable as in dyslexia. She has heard other pronunciations more often in recent years, though, and she won’t say which one is right.
Dyscalculia is sometimes called the math equivalent of dyslexia, although the comparison has its limits.
“I would describe dyscalculia as a learning difficulty that is related specifically to difficulty processing numerical information,” Mazzocco says. It can get in the way of everyday “life math” as well as school math, she says.
It can look different depending on age. A young child might struggle to grasp that five cookies and five houses are the same number of things, even though the houses are so much bigger. An older kid might still need to count on their fingers to add seven plus three, long after classmates can do it in their heads.
And, crucially, it has nothing to do with being smart. “We know it is not a reflection of intelligence at all,” Mazzocco says. “It’s very specific to numerical processing.”
In other words, there are a lot of ways for numbers to ruin your day.
We have gotten better at talking about kids who are bright and creative but struggle to read. We understand that a child can be gifted and still need help sounding out a sentence. We don’t automatically assume that difficulty reading means a child isn’t intelligent.
I wish we extended that same understanding to math.
Dyscalculia affects roughly 3% to 10% of people, about the same rate as dyslexia, Mazzocco says. (The National Institutes For Health place the higher number closer to 6.5% based on studies.) Attention to math difficulties has grown a lot since she started out in the field, but “it still is far behind” the attention paid to reading. Schools don’t have nearly as many math resource teachers as reading specialists. Pediatricians routinely tell parents to read to their kids. Far fewer tell them to do math with them.
Still there has been progress. Research over the past 20 years has emphasized the importance of developing “number sense,” or a child’s understanding of numbers and how they work. This has brought greater awareness of how important it is to support that development, Mazzocco says, and of the fact that some children may need more help than others.
There are kids who can read the entire book but can’t read the clock. Kids who can write a five-paragraph essay but can’t calculate the change they should get back at the store. Kids who can tell you everything about the solar system but can’t remember whether 7 goes into 42 six times or seven.
And because math is so often treated as a proxy for intelligence, those kids can spend years believing they’re stupid.
I know because I was one of them.
I still can’t reliably add or subtract in my head. I can write a story. I can report a complicated one. I can interview a stranger and find the one sentence that makes an entire piece click.
But tell me I owe you $17.50 and hand you a twenty, and there’s a decent chance I’ll just stand there smiling, waiting for you to tell me how much change I get back.
