A question was posed recently about the causes of dysclculia. My response got very long, so pared it down on the forum, but I’ve posted it in its entirety here.
What I’ve read suggests that neurological differences (dyscalculia, dyslexia, mood disorders, autism spectrum disorders) are highly heritable. I haven’t read any primary sources, so I don’t know the methodology for sorting out shared environmental versus genetic factors, but the secondary source authors seem to be satisfied that there’s enough evidence to suggest that dyscalculia is highly heritable.
Where it gets stickier, for me at least, is the intersection between learning disorders and stress. Stress and anxiety exacerbate just about every conceivable physical process, from blood pressure to memory formation. So how bad would my dyscalculia be if I hadn’t been verbally abused by my early teachers because I was bad at math? I certainly did much better in math when I had teachers who were patient.
Moreover, how bad would my dyscalculia have been if I’d been consistently taught in a way that made sense to me? When I was learning arithmetic at my Montessori school, I gravitated toward the visual-tactile math beads. These were wired strings of beads in certain units — one through ten — that are put together in various combinations to illustrate addition and subtraction. They were also made into squares and cubes to illustrate multiplication. I remember loving the way that multiplying a number by itself yielded such a neat geometric form.
By the time I finished kindergarten, I knew my addition, subtraction, and multiplication tables, which put me a few grades levels ahead of the other kids in my public first grade classroom. That was also the last math I ever really learned. If I’d stayed in a Montessori setting, able to see and touch the math that I was learning, I might still technically have dyscalculia, but I will always wonder if my symptoms would never have appeared. I think they’d certainly be better than they are now.
While I was growing up, I remember feeling that my parents couldn’t possibly understand what I was going through in math class. They berated me for my poor math grades through the entire course of my childhood. My mother told me she’d hated math when she was in school, but assured me that she “hadn’t applied herself” the way she should. My father told me that he always worked hard and got straight A’s, whatever the subject, and the only difference between him and me was that he “cared”.
A few years ago, I was going through some old box at my parents house, and was shocked when I found one of my father’s high school report cards. He was mostly an A student, with a few B’s … and a D in high school calculus. Basically, his grades looked just like mine. I showed it to him, rather indignantly, and he seemed as surprised as I was. He also seemed amused at himself. After what he’d put me through, I was a bit less amused. But it does seem to speak to the heritability of dyscalculia.
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