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 Having decided that a single day is not enough to get the word out about dysclaculia, some of us at the dyscalculia forum have decided to declare March to be Dyscalclulia Awareness Month. This will allow more flexibility for staging events, especially for students at college or university, since some of them are already on Spring Break this week.
I decided to start making Dyscalculia Awareness t-shirts over at Zazzle, so I was looking for some funny math-related quotes to put on them. I came across this one from Robert Heinlein, author of Stranger In A Strange Land and many other classic science fiction novels. I was never a huge fan of his work — while his work clearly advocates sexual liberation, it is very much from a mid-century attitude toward sexuality and gender. His stories are imbued with casual, unreflective homophobia and sexism. A (female!) character in Stranger remarks to the protagonist that true rape is actually very difficult, and that most of the time the woman wanted it anyway.
Yes, really.
So that was it for me and Robert Heinlein. But now I’ve found another reason to dislike him — he apparently hated dyscalculics too:
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. ~Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
So screw you, Robert Heinlein.
I was reading ADDiva’s blog yesterday and came across a post about a new initiative called “Think Beyond the Label”, aimed at improving employers’ attitudes towards people with disabilities. According to the website, an organization called “Health and Disability Advocates” is running the campaign “on behalf of almost 25 states and various national and regional organizations”. Unemployment is a huge problem in the disabled community, with more than 15% of us being unemployed, compared to the already-dismal 10% of the general population. Continue reading “Think Beyond The Label” is a great idea, but they didn’t think it through.
 March 3rd is World Dyscalculia Day. Celebrate by learning about this disorder, and helping to get the word out!
Dyscalculia is a math disability, similar to dyslexia. A lot of people joke about having “math dyslexia” without realizing that it’s quite real. In addition to effecting a person’s number sense and ability to work with math concepts, dyscalculia can cause difficulty telling time, reading a map, learning the rules to games, remembering dance steps, or dealing with formal music education. Also called “math disability” or “math disorder”, dyscalculia is recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV (315) as well as by the World Health Organization.
There are plenty of places to learn about dyscalculia on the web. To meet other folks with dyscalculia, check out the Dyscalculia Forum. For a basic introduction to the disorder, the wikipedia article is pretty thorough. LD Online has a description of the presentation of dyscalculia in different developmental stages, from early childhood through adulthood. Last but not least, there’s my own article at Squidoo, What The Heck Is Dyscalculia?, which is a humorous look at life as an adult with math disorder.
Happy World Dyscalculia Day!
Well, I’m back from France. It was awesome for all kinds of reasons. The food, the art, the food, the history, the architecture, the food …
Now comes the difficult part.
After two virtually structureless weeks, weeks in which I could go wherever my whimsy took me, weeks in which someone else cleaned my room and cooked my food, I have to return to my normal routine. But before I even do that, I have to recover from jetlag. At the moment my body has no idea what day or what time it is, and my mind has no clue about where it should be directing itself. I haven’t felt truly hydrated since getting off the plane Saturday night.
Overseas travel is a challenge to anyone, but for adults with attention deficit disorder, it presents unique challenges. We’re more sensitive than others to disruptions in our normal routine (as much as we may struggle against the very idea of routine). This is particularly true when the disruptions are physical. Changes to our diet, our sleep, our intake of water, alcohol, or caffeine — all of these can wreak havoc on our ADHD symptoms. And all of these are an inevitable part of travel.
I’m trying to give myself some slack as I recover from this trip. Of course, I feel like I should be hitting the ground running; but this isn’t fair. I’ve been trying to think in French for two weeks. I’ve been eating a lot more fat and carbs than usual. I’ve had more caffeine and more wine than I normally do (because you just can’t have pain au chocolat without coffee, dammit, even if it is decaf!). And my body clock has had to abruptly re-set itself by nine hours twice in the last two weeks.
Yesterday I gave my brain the day off, and spent the whole day watching tv. Today I worked out, which has already helped, and made sure to drink an electrolyte beverage afterward. That seems to be helping with the hydration issue. And I’m working in my studio, with all its daylight spectrum lighting, and letting the light work its magic.
I’m writing this post from JFK airport en route to Paris. I think I made it out of the house without forgetting anything critical (I obviously have my boarding passes and passport, right?) and I even managed to get a few hours of sleep last night.
I just realized that my last two posts (including this one) have been really light on content. That will teach me to play with my Wordpress theme … anyway, I will resume posting when I return after February 27th. Hopefully I’ll have a lot of great stories about France and dysclaculia. Or something.
If you’re bored, check out my series on ADD and travel at Well-Ordered Chaos.
I updated the Atahualpa Wordpress theme I use, and in the process lost several images. I’ll try to put those back at some point, but it probably won’t be until after my return from France in a few weeks. In the mean time, if the site acts wonky, please let me know so I can get on it. Thanks!
 Want fries with that? A few weeks back, I wrote about the temptations of graduate school for adults with learning disabilities — particularly those of us who are “twice-exceptional”. If you’re great at a certain subject, if you enjoy it, if you get validation from your professors in that area, why not consider a PhD program?
If you’re also incredibly weak in the clerical skills required of most entry-level jobs, if your self-esteem has taken a beating over the years because of your learning problems, if you get into the work force and find that the only positions you’re considered for are retail and food service … well, grad school has GOT to be better than this, right?
So you did it. You got into grad school. Only now your friends who graduated last year are back in their crappy service sector jobs while juggling two or three adjunct faculty positions. They can barely make rent, they have no benefits, and you’re beginning to wonder if you’ve been snowed. Continue reading Grad School and the Learning Disabled Adult
 As you may know, I divide my online writing time between my blogs and Squidoo. Squidoo is an online self-publishing platform that allows you to create articles, called “lenses”, without necessarily knowing all the technical stuff you need to know to run a Wordpress blog.
Yesterday my lens on math disability, What the Heck is Dysclaculia, was made Lens of the Day!
Of course, the validation is wonderful, but most importantly there are now hundreds of people who now know what dyscalculia is. This includes people who saw themselves in the article, people who realized that it described their friends or family members, and teachers who are taking this information to their schools. This is great news. The better people are informed, the better life is for those of us who have math disorder.
Journalist Ethan Watters was on The Daily Show last week, talking about this new book “Crazy Like Us: the Globalization of the American Psyche.” In it he questions the usefulness of the American biomedical model of mental illness when its applied to the rest of the world. John Stewart jokes that this might be a good thing — since we’re not exporting cars, exporting depression has to be worth something. Watters responded:
“… It is worth something. It’s a tremendous seller. When we get another culture, like Japan, to buy into our notion of depression, to move that line between where the pathological and the normal is, we can score a huge profit.”
Huh. Depression is “normal”. I guess all those years that I struggled to get out of bed, to leave the house, to keep myself from slitting my wrists — I wasn’t “pathological” at all! I was “normal”. I guess the only thing wrong with me is that I was an unwitting dupe of Big Pharma. Silly me! Continue reading Dear Ethan Watters: Depression Is Not “Normal”
  I was recently checking out ADDitude Magazine’s bloggers. It turns out one of their bloggers is a highly-educated 30-something woman who’s bounced around a lot, jobwise. A kindred spirit!
Her most recent post is called ADHD Relationship Communication Fears and Flaws. It got me thinking of the gifts and challenges brought to relationships by adults with attention deficit disorder. What struck me about it was the following:
“If intuition is such a powerful gift then why do I feel that on one hand my intuition is as sharp as a dog’s, and on the other hand it is totally off base… I try hard to communicate to them [boyfriend and boss] my needs, but the harder I try the greater of a mess it becomes.”
This is something that mystified me for years. I’m incredibly sensitive to others’ moods, and yet I find conversation excruciatingly difficult — especially with strangers, or when I’m trying to communicate my own needs. If I’m so intuitive, this kind of thing should be easy, right?
Well, no, it isn’t. Continue reading Love, Communcation, and the ADD Adult
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