Note: This article is based on a blog post by Chris Guillebeau, in which he tells us about the difficulties he faced in learning mathematics throughout his life.
I tried a lot but couldn't learn; I tried again and again and it wasn't easy; I failed to advance more than 7th grade math level; I can understand very basic principles of algebra and geometry but nothing more. Many people tried to help me; I read books and took courses, but despite everything I did, nothing worked.
Many years later, in 1997, I was trying to graduate from university. I managed to get into community college, had passed all classes except math, and was studying for a degree in sociology, which fortunately did not require advanced math but required some skill in mathematics.
In the last quarter of the year before graduation, I went to college for a very simple math class. Most of my fellow students were people you would expect to be unqualified or couldn't afford a normal university; they were overworked people, often with many part-time jobs, and most of them had kids and were unable to obtain childcare. In other words, I was relatively lucky compared with them.
At that stage, I also had social skills and was showing the early signs of leadership abilities, So I invested in them as my only strengths. I asked questions in class and generally tried to show that I was paying attention. When we had to do group work, I organized the group and spoke for it. As a leader, I tried to highlight others in the group and their contributions.
However, this strategy only kept me ahead of the class for a couple of weeks. Once we started learning harder stuff than the very basic math, I got left behind. My classmates tried to explain formulas to me, and I pretended to understand because it was embarrassing to be so unable to understand.
Being a community college, it was hard to fail as long as I made an effort, and I certainly did a lot. I don't remember what grade I got in that class, but if it was higher than poor, I'm sure I didn't deserve it.
This was repeated after a year in my graduate studies when I took a statistics course. The experience was disastrous from beginning to end. I felt that I was in a world where I did not understand a word. In such cases, it may seem that I have one of two options. Learn or fail, but I opted for another strategy. I attended every class; I was never late; I sat in the front row; and I asked questions to prove I was paying attention.
On the day of the final exam, I looked at the paper and almost did not understand any of the questions. I wrote a slur on the front side of the paper and drew an arrow to indicate the continuation on the back side, and on that side, I wrote a list of the “top 10 things I learned in statistics class” and made sure some of them really related to the information in class, even if I didn't understand it, and as a result, I got an average grade.
Dyscalculia
I tell you all this because, I suppose, if you are still reading, it is probably because you also have difficulty with mathematics. I read a book called The Spy Who Couldn't Spell. The book tells the story of the American spy Brian Regan, a smart but clumsy person who had a security clearance that gave him access to top-secret information, and he had hidden thousands of pages of intelligence in food containers throughout the forests of Maryland and Virginia. This was a failed attempt to win millions of dollars from foreign governments in exchange for this information.
I'll make the story short: Part of the crime-solving relied on a government expert named Daniel Olson, who was called in to help decipher the many codes that Reagan had put in place so that his spying would not be exposed, and here it gets interesting—not the spy story itself; rather, it relates to our story here:
Olson didn't do as badly in school as Reagan, but just as Reagan suffered from dyslexia and Olson struggled with what he saw as a severe handicap, an inability to do math problems, if he had sought medical advice, he would have been diagnosed with dyscalculia, a brain malfunction that makes it very difficult to do calculations and understand math concepts.
Although Olson did not suffer like Reagan after friends and teachers considered him stupid, his difficulties with mathematics were the source of a deep sense of inadequacy that haunted him in and out of school, and his last average score in this subject was in the third grade. Since then, he has been constantly getting a very poor grade or worse, and the problem wasn't that Olson was unable to think logically; he was adept when it came to solving word problems, but he stood helpless when faced with numerical operations, formulas, and equations.
Later in the story, a prominent commander appreciated Olson's abilities and recruited him for a high-ranking job in Washington. He was working on assignments that would eventually lead to him being part of catching the mole, but there's only one problem: he never finished school.
He couldn't tell anyone in the FBI why he didn't have a degree yet; he failed his math exams despite many attempts, and it didn't help him to change colleges. In the end, with only the help of an educational counselor, Olson was able to complete his undergraduate degree in the three months available to him and pass the college math exam. A nice teacher helped him get an average grade.
When I read that, it sounded very similar to my story. Nowadays, most of us understand that there are many types of intelligence; in fact, there are nine: Mathematical Intelligence, Linguistic Intelligence, Musical Intelligence, Kinetic Intelligence, Existential or Social Intelligence, Deep Personal Intelligence, Naturalistic Intelligence, and Spatial Intelligence.
However, most of us can also notice that some of these types of intelligence are held in higher esteem than others in modern times.
The condition that Olson may suffer from is called dyscalculia, and Wikipedia describes it as: “a difficulty in learning or understanding numeracy, such as difficulty understanding and learning to manipulate numbers and learning facts in mathematics, and is generally seen as a specific developmental disorder.”
People of all IQs can develop dyscalculia, but their IQ is often above average and is associated with difficulties measuring time and spatial reasoning. Estimates of the prevalence of dyscalculia range from 3 to 6% of the population, and a quarter of children with dyscalculia have attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity.
It is clear that a person who works in the field of writing codes has skills beyond those of most highly qualified people, and it is very likely that they have high intelligence, yet this person may also suffer from this condition that makes mastering mathematics difficult.
I focused on the last sentence about ADHD because that's another thing that's getting more attention now than it used to, especially among adults. I was diagnosed with ADHD, and two years ago I started taking medication, which changed my life.
I don't diagnose myself with dyscalculia, and I can't diagnose you with dyscalculia, attention deficit disorder, or anything else. All I know is that no matter what I did, I could never learn advanced math, and the problem was neither the teacher nor a lack of ambition or neglect of study. I suppose it wasn't a developmental delay because I was able to do other things despite this handicap.
In conclusion
If you can't learn math too, or if you are reading this now and can't learn math, then maybe it's not your fault. Instead of trying to overcome this difficulty, you should find a way around it. If you focus on other types of intelligence, especially those in which you have a talent, then perhaps you will find an area in which you are really special.
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