Look, can we quit it with the conflation of arithmetic and higher mathematics?
I have dyscalculia. My teachers gave up on teaching me to perform basic arithmetic in tenth grade. I struggle with anything below trigonometry, and even trig is hard for me.
I have a bachelor’s in pure math and a master’s in statistics. Calculus? I can do that. Abstract algebra? I’m there. Topology and probability theory? Awesome. (Don’t ask me to do combinatorics, though. Don’t know why, but my brain nopes out on that one.)
I am SICK AND TIRED of reassuring kids I teach who come into our intro stats or calc courses going “I’m bad at math” and expecting to fail. A good three quarters of the time I probe further and discover they failed or nearly failed algebra because they struggle with arithmetic, and now they’re convinced they’re going to fail anything that even looks like it might possibly be adjacent to math.
WE HAVE CALCULATORS NOW, PEOPLE. Inability to do arithmetic is not even close to the end of your mathematics career. So can we please quit discouraging kids now?
Dyscalculia high five!
I often wonder how my life would be different if I’d had different/better math teachers.
People always think I’m joking when I say “no I cannot figure out the tip. I can’t do math.”
But you went to MIT!!
Right and I never ever learned to add, multiply, subtract or divide in my head.
I also never had (still don’t) an intuitive feel for numbers – someone will say “if we sell 800 units that’s what, $5M? At 40% margin?” It means nothing to me until I put it in Excel. I could not even guesstimate, I’d be off by an order of magnitude or more. I would put answers on exams like “50000 KiloJoules” which is like more energy than an actual explosion or something, for a question about how much energy is produced by some metabolic pathway in a cell. I did not get how obviously “off” the number was.
I do still love math tho.
I manage million dollar budgets and regularly discuss finance/actuarial forecasting but I can’t figure a tip without a calculator.
Also failed college algebra and had to take two remedial algebra courses before I could try again so…
I had over 200 points difference between my math and verbal SAT scores 🙃🙃🙃
THIS IS BLOWING MY MIND.
I had a 720 on the verbal. I had a 350 on the math. I feel you all.
high five for team can’t do math. one of the great disappointments of my life is how if you can’t do numbers maths, no one will let you do abstract maths. which is a shame, because i haaaate one and am fascinated by the other, but nope, no fun maths for me.
Dyscalculic, dropped out of maths in high school on the advice of the Head of Maths because I was clearly not cut out for it.
My PhD is in palaeontological shape analysis, so basically, non-Euclidean geometry and non-parametric multivariate stats. I can’t work out percentages or remember phone numbers, but my day to day thinking for my job happens in fifty-dimensional spherical space. Am I bad at maths? You tell me.
(peeps, seriously, if you wanna do a thing and you think maths is in your way, don’t give up. If you keep pushing sooner or later you get through the shitty arithmetic and out into the beautiful fun useful interesting maths on the other side.)
I only found out dyscalculia was a thing recently. So *that’s* why I mix up numbers, couldn’t tell time till I was like 12, and have to recite phone numbers and pass numbers slowly and carefully…