Heya!
Hey, wow I didn't know people read this!
It has been really long since I posted, I guess lately I've been doing alot of things that make me forget I had dyscalculia. I've been drawing, learning languages, singing, and doing the things I enjoy since I've been out of highschool for quite some time!
I've played alot of those brain training games on the Nintendo DS also. It doesn't just have number games, it has all kinds of games... which I enjoy playing :). I just found that in a different environment, and at a more relaxed pace, i can do this better (adding, subtracting, multiplication... i was always better at division, it makes more sense for some reason :D, dividing things!). I don't feel the pressure anymore from being with my parents, or at school, or feeling stupid about it, and knowing that I'm not stupid. So the reason I started the blog was to release some of the pain I felt from it, actually didn't even know the blog was listed :).
But now I have read the comments (got rid of the spam even :o, wow didn't even know they would find it, I guess blogger is so much more popular now then when I first started blogging! Which was... wow, I started this blog 4 years ago, but I have some older blogs even :) wow I'm getting old ;P but its just all numbers anyway ;).
Anyway, if anyone has some suggestions about what to write on this site, feel free to comment :). Also, I think it helps to comment on your own experiences! I think the blog is easy to find, so maybe it can help more people with dyscalculia, to share our experiences.
I don't know if it's just me, or that I'm kind of a creative artsy person, because even though I enjoy maths as a concept, the actual 'doing sums' and doing equations was very boring to me to, and I guess its very hard for me to focus on accurate number crunching. For me its more like concentration practice now. I used to really confuse number and signs, and for myself it was more like this lack of attention where I would just see things differently + x - and the divide sign (which I can't type on this keyboard :S)... they all look similar if you rotate it, or take off some dots :p.
I'm very good at those rotating puzzles where you have to find out which dice is the right one for the flat layout etc. I used to see the guy in my upper maths class have to cut out a sheet of paper to find out... to me it was so easy to model things in my head, and i can make it inside my imagination anyway. But like things that I had to rote learn, i had trouble with.
To expand a bit on my childhood history, I think I had some trauma from when my dad said I couldnt come out of the bathroom till I had learn my times tables (forgot which line of the tables, but anyway). I wasn't locked in there, but it was very stressful, and I was crying, having to memorise some stuff that made no sense, it was just a list of numbers. They were such bad parents. But yeah, in elementary school I was really slow doing the timetables, and the class would go round in a circle and have to say them. It made no sense then, it was just a list of numbers.
Now when I add and substract I can just visualise it. I just see it as blocks or something, and I use 10 as a base, and I can chop bits off to add together to 10, and see whats left, and then that's what it is. Like 8 + 7 is taking 2 off the 7 to make a complete block, and so i have 15. So everytime i add stuff, im just chopping stuff in my head. I think its faster though to know the multiplication tables well than to visualise it, for me at least. But I think there should be no pressure on kids to learn them, they should be shown patterns in them to help them remember, instead of rote learning, rote-learning is boring and doesn't help people understanding. When people have a deeper understanding of things, the whole subject becomes alot easier to understand.
It has been really long since I posted, I guess lately I've been doing alot of things that make me forget I had dyscalculia. I've been drawing, learning languages, singing, and doing the things I enjoy since I've been out of highschool for quite some time!
I've played alot of those brain training games on the Nintendo DS also. It doesn't just have number games, it has all kinds of games... which I enjoy playing :). I just found that in a different environment, and at a more relaxed pace, i can do this better (adding, subtracting, multiplication... i was always better at division, it makes more sense for some reason :D, dividing things!). I don't feel the pressure anymore from being with my parents, or at school, or feeling stupid about it, and knowing that I'm not stupid. So the reason I started the blog was to release some of the pain I felt from it, actually didn't even know the blog was listed :).
But now I have read the comments (got rid of the spam even :o, wow didn't even know they would find it, I guess blogger is so much more popular now then when I first started blogging! Which was... wow, I started this blog 4 years ago, but I have some older blogs even :) wow I'm getting old ;P but its just all numbers anyway ;).
Anyway, if anyone has some suggestions about what to write on this site, feel free to comment :). Also, I think it helps to comment on your own experiences! I think the blog is easy to find, so maybe it can help more people with dyscalculia, to share our experiences.
I don't know if it's just me, or that I'm kind of a creative artsy person, because even though I enjoy maths as a concept, the actual 'doing sums' and doing equations was very boring to me to, and I guess its very hard for me to focus on accurate number crunching. For me its more like concentration practice now. I used to really confuse number and signs, and for myself it was more like this lack of attention where I would just see things differently + x - and the divide sign (which I can't type on this keyboard :S)... they all look similar if you rotate it, or take off some dots :p.
I'm very good at those rotating puzzles where you have to find out which dice is the right one for the flat layout etc. I used to see the guy in my upper maths class have to cut out a sheet of paper to find out... to me it was so easy to model things in my head, and i can make it inside my imagination anyway. But like things that I had to rote learn, i had trouble with.
To expand a bit on my childhood history, I think I had some trauma from when my dad said I couldnt come out of the bathroom till I had learn my times tables (forgot which line of the tables, but anyway). I wasn't locked in there, but it was very stressful, and I was crying, having to memorise some stuff that made no sense, it was just a list of numbers. They were such bad parents. But yeah, in elementary school I was really slow doing the timetables, and the class would go round in a circle and have to say them. It made no sense then, it was just a list of numbers.
Now when I add and substract I can just visualise it. I just see it as blocks or something, and I use 10 as a base, and I can chop bits off to add together to 10, and see whats left, and then that's what it is. Like 8 + 7 is taking 2 off the 7 to make a complete block, and so i have 15. So everytime i add stuff, im just chopping stuff in my head. I think its faster though to know the multiplication tables well than to visualise it, for me at least. But I think there should be no pressure on kids to learn them, they should be shown patterns in them to help them remember, instead of rote learning, rote-learning is boring and doesn't help people understanding. When people have a deeper understanding of things, the whole subject becomes alot easier to understand.
Labels: dyscalclia, maths
posted by X at 11:21 PM
1 Comments:
Yay, you're back! I hope for good :)
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