Adventures Of A Neurospicy City Boy: 4

When the Math's doesn’t math. 


Maths, oh how I hate maths! Just as letters move around, numbers also keep moving. This bit of my neurospicy is called dyscalculia.


The whole concept of maths drives me crazy. Let's take 7 divided by 5. I’m supposed to somehow take two different numbers and split them to make one number, but that number somehow has bits leftover in a fraction. Now a fraction is 1 number on top and one below so in this example it’s two numbers, 2 and 5, and that’s still a 7, but it’s less than the 7 we used in the sum. If you say since it’s up and down, it’s different, but who decides to just push a number down, just because you feel like keeping one number on the top. This is not the right way to show how small the number is. 


Whoever invented numbers and fractions just couldn't accept that they were wrong, so they just created new numbers to make themselves right. They weren’t happy with regular numbers so they came up with fractions and decimals. Then they decided to create negative numbers and then somewhere they created imaginary numbers. I gave up on maths at this point. If this is the way it works, then if I come up with a new number then I can't be wrong as long as I can explain how I got it. Even if most people don't understand, it's just them being bad at understanding my maths.


Using my fingers to count helped, but when you get to a certain number even fingers can't help anymore.  How are you supposed to do maths if every time you look at a number it’s different? Using a calculator isn’t much help either. By the time I look at the number on a page and then look at the number on the calculator, it’s different. If I have to enter a large number, 1 digit usually goes missing on the way. Then copying the answer from the calculator to the page is also a dance of the moving and hiding numbers. Is it any wonder I once got 3/80 in a maths paper. And I’m sure the 3 was out of pity. 


Don’t get me started on word problems. The dyslexia meant I didn’t understand what was being asked and the dyscalculia meant I couldn’t solve the sum even if I managed to figure out the question. Dropping maths as a subject before it got to quadratic equations and trigonometry was one of the happiest days of my school life. 


After plenty of therapy, I can handle life skills maths like shopping and budgeting and can even get a calculator to mostly function, but maths as a concept still feels like something entirely made up by an overactive imagination with no logic. 

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