AddaptAbilities » math disorder

Dyscalculia and Doing Business by Phone

Addy — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 01:08:28 +0000

So, I’m trying to do business with a place that’s only open by appointment. Fine. They have a phone number, so I call it. I’m hoping to make an appointment for the following day, which is a Sunday, to avoid Bay Bridge traffic on a weekday. I figure 24 hours notice should be plenty, if they’re around 7 days a week.

Their website lists a phone number, so I call it. No answer. No voice mail, even. “That’s odd,” I think to myself, “maybe they only turn on the voice mail after hours or something. I’ll call back in a bit”.

So I called back in a bit. Still no answer. By this time I was beginning to get a little annoyed. Did these people want my business or what? If they’re only open by appointment, allegedly seven days a week, they really need to be easier to get a hold of.

Then I tried again the next morning. Still no answer. Still no voice mail. “Who do these people think they are?” I fumed. “They don’t have regular hours — that’s their prerogative. It’s even understandable, since they have a big warehouse and mostly do mail order. But if they’re going to demand an appointment, they need to let me make a friggin’ appointment!”

Finally it occurred to me to check the number on their website again for like the tenth time. I had to hold my phone up to my computer screen to finally see that yes, I did have the number correct — except for the fact that I was using the local area code with their toll free number.

I was calling a number that didn’t exist.

Usually what happens is I just transpose digits within the number, which I did several times later that day when trying to contact someone who was buying my crap on Craigslist. Again, I had to hold the phone up to the computer screen, and look at the number in the call log, and read the numbers out loud to myself to realize I’d screwed it up.

I wound up losing a whole day to dyscalculia, and I’m on a bit of a deadline here — I was hoping to get some work done this weekend with my purchase from the warehouse. And that’s not even getting into the hassle of the Craigslisting, and then the extra time I’ll spend because I’ll have to go to this warehouse on a weekday and deal with traffic.

Why can’t phones have names instead of numbers? Or even be assigned words? It would be so much easier.

Dammit.

Dyscalculia and Body Awareness: Injury Update

Addy — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:03:13 +0000

This has been sitting in my editing box for more than a month now. Since it’s Dyscalculia Awareness Month, I figured it’s only appropriate that I dust it off and publish it.

Awhile back I wrote about a painful muscle strain I’d developed in my shoulder and neck area. Like many dyscalculics, I have a poor sense of my body in space, and how not to move without hurting myself. Most of the time I hurt myself in small ways, by running into things. Other times I develop repetitive stress injuries because I’m not aware that I’m holding myself in an awkward, damaging position.

It started when I was sick, curled up on the couch in a position that didn’t feel awkward at the time. I was sort of aware of pain and discomfort, but I kept working out, and then I did some work on my car, and then I woke up the next morning unable to sit up. It seriously took me several minutes to figure out how to get out of bed without screaming.

Since then I’ve had some deep tissue massage, some stretching, some ultrasound massage, more stretching, a lot of advil, more stretching, sports gel, more stretching, hot and cold packs, and more stretching. The injury seemed to stay about the same. It would hurt like hell when I woke up, then I would massage the area with sports gel, and it would be much better. Then I’d wake up the next morning once again in horrible pain.

What finally helped was a trick from the Alexander Technique that I’d learned several years ago — the “semi-supine” position. The idea is to relax your muscles by lying on your back in a completely neutral position; that is, your feet are flat on the floor, your knees are bent, your head is supported, and your spine is allowed to fall into its natural shape. By doing this for ten minutes I already felt better than I had in weeks. This 46 second video demonstrates how to do it.

Alexander Tehcnique, Semi-Supine Position

Since My New Year’s resolution was to improve my proprioception with the precise goal of not doing this crap to myself anymore, I had already checked out some books from the library about the Alexander Technique. One of them introduced me to the “prone position”, in which you lie on your stomach, your chest supported by a few books or a yoga brick, and your forehead on the floor. In this position, your spine bears no weight at all; and according to the book, it was a good remedy for tightness in in the shoulder and neck area. After doing that for ten minutes, following ten minutes in semi-supine, I felt almost normal.

So, at last, my shoulder and neck are feeling a lot better.

There are a lot of Alexander resources out there. This video is pretty informative, though I get a bit of a “dear leader” vibe from it. The book I found to be the most useful was called How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live. It’s free of a lot of the pseudoscience that plagues these sorts of books. In fact, it goes a step farther, with the author explaining in basic evolutionary terms why humans have trouble with movement and injury while other animals don’t. Basically, the issue is one of neuroplasticity. Whereas other animals are born knowing how to walk, humans have freed up that brain space to enable us to learn. The upside is that we’re really adaptable. The downside need to be taught almost everything that we know and do, including movement.

March is Dyscalculia Awareness Month!

Addy — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 15:56:45 +0000

Over at the Dyscalculia Forum, we got to talking about World Dyscalculia Day. World Dyscalculia Day, which falls on March 3rd (3/3, so we don’t get confused) has been a great thing — since 2008, people have made videos, written articles, created t-shirts, and gotten the word out to their local schools, districts, and universities about math disorder.

But what if we had more than just a day? Say, a whole month. We would have more flexibility for event planning. We’d have more time to get involved. Most of all, there would be more opportunities to get the word out about dyscalculia. To that end, I wrote this article launching Dyscalculia Awareness Month. I also made some t-shirts at Zazzle.

If you’d like to get involved, a great place to start is to at the Dyscalculia Forum’s “Spread The Word” page. The admins have posted two brochures that you can download. Print as many copies as you want; then drop them off at your school’s disability office, or your child’s school district office, or even your doctor’s office. Or, write a blog post, made a video for YouTube, put some t-shirts on CafePress or Zazzle.

Then, leave a comment below, or send me an e-mail, and I’ll backlink to your site here at AddaptAbilities.

Robert Heinlein, Dyscalculia Hater

Addy — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:54:46 +0000

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.