Bad at Math, Good at English?

Post Reply New Topic

That was a problem for me with higher mathmatics, the more abstract they became, the less they made sense to me..
If not for my depression during my Senior Year of HS, I would have excelled at Geometry. On most tests, like the GED, I find those questions the easiest because I can grasp the concepts VISUALLY.
Which is why Art & Creative Writing interested me a whole lot more than Algebra II did.
***************************
And which subject you are good at has NOTHING to do with being autistic, other than showing which areas of your brain are being used. Interesting, but not relevant to dx at all. ASDmostly relates to Social communication problems and withdrawl.

Sincerely,
Matthew

Anyone here been diagnosed with Dyscalculia? It's the mathematical equivalent of dyslexia. For some reason people widely accept dyslexia as existing but scoff that someone cant keep track of numbers in their head. I haven't been officially diagnosed, but I feel like I certainly meet much of the criteria for it. In high school and college I had relatively good grades - except for in math. I failed my final high school algebra class and barely scraped by in statistics with a D. In grade school I did well in math because I could just use rote memorization but when it came to memorizing formulas and more advanced concepts, it just doesn't click with me. The only math class I did well in after grade school was geometry and it was in part because I had a great teacher and also because she wrote out every single step very meticulously in words.

I also in community college failed college algebra - twice. Apparently that community college had the third hardest math program in the state, behind two other four year universities. Despite going to the tutor and spending hours and hours trying to figure out my homework, I failed my first test both times, and by an even larger amount the second time. Nothing hurts your brain and intellectual ego more than working your butt off only to achieve epic failure.

I'm definitely better with English than I am with math. That said, I also happen to enjoy statistics and such.

Unfortunately, it isn't a diagnosis that is readily available, and even if you get diagnosed, they haven't really come up with interventions that work (we have tried everything for my son, and I mean EVERYTHING. Music, books with animated numbers, flashcards, computer games, writing exercises, etc. Every thing that comes down the pike, we'll try it for a full summer and nothing sticks.) It's in the stages that dyslexia was in when I was a kid - some people have heard of it, but the answer is still a shrug of the shoulders.

We did, however, enroll our son in a study on the subject in hopes that they will come up with something.

I've always been terrible at maths. I can't grasp some of the most straightforward mathematical concepts, to the extent that in my 50s, I'm still unable to do long division. I did manage marks in my maths exams for trigonometry and geometry, but the idea of me learning even the most basic algebra was just laughable. I couldn't even grasp the difference between positive and negative numbers and how to work with them until I was about 15! My maths teacher was lovely and realised that I just genuinely couldn't do it – she made up special worksheets with basic arithmetical problems for me and a boy in the class who'd been so ill in childhood that he'd missed most of his schooling, so that we wouldn't be sitting there doing nothing and feeling helpless. I was very relieved to leave school and not have to face maths lessons any more.

I was a hyperlexic child and always excelled in spelling, grammar and composition, but I've never been able to do comprehension and analysis of texts. I tend to read things literally and even after 50 years' practice I still occasionally don't even see subtext. More often I can comprehend it in an instinctive way, but I'm not able to analyse or explain it. At school I got A* for my O-Level English Language, and Unclassified (which means so desperately bad they can't even be bothered to give you a grade) in English Literature.

So yes...I'm also somewhat uneven in my abilities.

I was really good at maths and awful at english right up until high school. I used to battle to put two sentences on paper, partly because of my ADHD and Dyslexia. Around year ten when we were making the mathamatical leap from algebra to trig, something in my head flipped and by the middle of the year i had written a complete 80 000 word novel, long hand, mostly during my math lessons. Needless to say, i failed maths that year and was never any good at it again. My english marks as well as my second language shot to the top of the class and i landed up debating and public speaking.... odd for an Aspie i know. Maybe year ten being my first year of bording school had something to do with the odd change in behaviour and ability. Worth noting that prior to year ten i had been able to tell stories but only verbally.

I believe, for me at least, that my skills with language stem directly from AS, in that I feel I need to better understand the language to understand other people, since I can't read them at all. Also, I think it helps that due to my lack of social skills, I was majorly rejected as a kid, and because I "misbehaved" I was always grounded from everything (and I mean that literally, I was grounded for something like 6 years straight from TV, computer, going over to friend's houses when I had them, etc. ) so I turned to books (my mom tried to ground me from those, as well, since I enjoyed them so much, but realized pretty quickly just how bad an idea that was..)

As a result, I read, and understood, Sphere (Michael Chriton) and The Third Pandemic (Pierre Ouellette, although I needed a dictionary for some of the medical jargon) in 4th grade, and I actually can still recall all the major plot points (havn't re-read them, but have them on my list)

My math skills, however... Let's just say I don't understand why I need to know math that I'm never going to use... If it had practical applications for what I want to do, I'd learn it, and I do, on my own, if I need to do something. While in Algebra 101 (which I intentionally took a D in so I could re-take it, because I didn't feel I understood it, and it is a pre-req. for a pre-req. to get a gen-ed credit...) we learned things that even the professor said had no real use... Why do I need to learn that? I want to be a translator/interpreter, pretty sure I don't need to know polynomials...

They don't teach you this in school, but math is in everything - particularly algebra. Cooking is all about algebra; most of us cook instinctively, but it's all about appropriate ratios and changing ratios.

Terrible at math and anything math related. I can do enough to calculate concentrations, molarity etc stuff that I need to do for my job, but once you get to calculus, I'm done. However, I am excellent with written media. I can read VERY fast and absorb the information (it helps if it is interesting to me, if it isn't that is harder). I knocked out the entire hunger games trilogy in really just a few hours. I have two kids so couldn't read it in one sitting, but I read it over the course of two nights where I spent maybe two hours each night reading? Maybe three. I lose track of time when I'm reading something I like, all I know is I was upset when I finished it because it's hard for me to find a fiction book I like. Otherwise I read non-fiction.