How do you know if you have dyscalculia?

0:00Hi there, welcome to What in the World is Discount Qualia, the podcast that is all about the specific learning disorder for mathematics. I'm Dr. Hanora Wall, I'm your host of the podcast. If you've listened before, welcome back. If you're new to the podcast, thank you for joining us. The podcast is sponsored by Edge Account Learning, which is our for-profit arm that offers teacher training certification and being a Discount Qualia specialist and K-12 classes for students with Discount Qualia. In coming this fall, we'll be adding pre-calc to our lineup, so I'm very excited about that. You can also find a lot of information for free at the DTRI.org. That's the Discount Qualia Training and Research Institute, and that is a 501C3 dedicated to changing the lived experience of people with Discount Qualia.

1:01I am starting this podcast episode with a recent epiphany I had about myself, which doesn't seem to surprise too many other people I've told it to, which is interesting in and of itself. I think this one will really land for the older listeners, especially adults who grew up in a time where, like I did, it didn't matter if you had a problem in school, you needed to figure it out, and growing up with that system where Discount Qualia only existed in the neurology research, maybe a little bit of psychology research, and not very much in the educational space, when I was coming through K-12, even dyslexia was pretty new, starting to gain awareness, and certainly nowhere near the understanding and training that we have today. That's good news for us in the world of Discount Qualia and dysgraphia, dyspraxia.

2:07We can see the path forward through funded research opportunities that really help us nail down the right interventions and accommodations for all of the specific learning disorders and other types of neurodivergence. Here's my epiphany. I have Discount Qualia, and I thought that I did not, because I've spent the last 20-something years doing math all day every day as a classroom teacher in my research around Discount Qualia and in my awareness and training campaigns for Discount Qualia. So I do want to talk a little bit about that, how this epiphany happened, and how did this come about, and if you're not sure if you have Discount Qualia, or if you think that you definitely don't, but you have all the indicators, then maybe it's something for you to consider, and that's really what happened to me.

3:11I have all of the indicators of Discount Qualia. I always did. My K-12 math experience was highly unpleasant, highly unpleasant, all the way through. And as much as I was smart and capable in every other subject area, math did not land for me in any way, shape, or form, and everyone I knew, and everyone who knew me, just defined me as a person who was not capable of doing math. I just couldn't do it. And then later on as an adult, I ended up going back to the beginning. If you've read my book, Teaching Students with Discount Qualia, you know a little bit of this journey, but I'm going to have to make a second edition of that book because in the introduction I say, I don't have Discount Qualia because I just didn't know. I had very much internalized that the reason why I could not do math is because, see if

4:15any of these adjectives ring true for you. I was flighty, I was distracted, I was uninterested, I wasn't trying hard enough, and that's why I couldn't do it. And if I would have just applied myself, then I could have. That's completely false. It's an absolutely false narrative, and it's part of the self-blame and shame that most people with Discount Qualia feel, even now when we're getting better at discussing learning disabilities, and we're getting better at discussing and identifying, and hopefully officially diagnosing learning disabilities like Discount Qualia. Even as that's a bigger part of our narrative, there's still that feeling of self-blame and shame for people who have a learning disability. So I add on the indicators, I had to go back and teach myself math as an adult, and I'm

5:18in my early 30s going back, taking my son's second and third grade math textbook and starting at page one. It was a lot. It took a really long time, and there were a lot of weeks of crying over third grade word problems. It took a really long time for me to figure these things out, and a lot of that was working out the trauma of my K-12 math experience. That's certainly a large piece, especially for anyone listening who's over 30. You're going to have a lot more of that. Not that our younger students, our listeners under 30 don't have it. They absolutely do, but hopefully we are starting to address that more and change that trajectory. All right, so I had to work through teaching myself math. I had to figure out what worked for me, and then as I got into teaching math and working with struggling students, and then later hearing about and then studying Discount Qualia,

6:22one common phrase I would hear from my students all the time, I still do, is why does it make sense when you say it? It doesn't make any sense when my teacher tells it to me. Why didn't anybody say it this way before? And I've always said, you know, I really don't know. I have no idea, it seems so obvious to me. Well, that's because I think about math differently. I process it differently, and I understand it differently. Not that I don't understand it. Today, I can do all sorts of math quite a bit of it in my head. I still think about it differently because when I think about my interpretation of math and my expression of math and what's exciting and interesting about math, most math teachers look at me with a blank face. It's not really landing for them what I have to say. So there is a disconnect, and now it makes sense to me. Part of that disconnect is that I have a neurodivergent way of thinking about math.

7:26That is still true when I work with other Discount Qualia experts and teacher trainers who focus a lot on the elementary math and manipulatives and that CRA concrete representational abstract method of teaching, which is fantastic. So much for me. So there is that disconnect, but now that makes a lot more sense to me. I shared this with one of our board members at the DTRI, who was part of the team that developed the free online screener at disctest.com, d-y-s-c-t-e-s-t.com. I really do like that screener quite a bit, but I was sharing this sort of epiphany with her. And she said, yes, you told me that two, three years ago when you took our screener. And I said, but I don't think the screener said, I have Discount Qualia. She said, it's to add a lot of babies and a lot of indicators.

8:29And you don't get babies and indicators if you don't have this different way of thinking. And I got those babies and those indicators because I've been doing math for 20 years all day every day. I know enough about the patterns. I know how we ask questions. I know what to expect. So I'm going to skew results if I take a true diagnostic assessment. If I did a neuropsych either, I would bet I would have to use a discrepancy model to really see a difference. And here's why. Again, I know enough about math now. And I know enough about pattern recognition and test-taking strategies that I'm quite sure my math scores would be above the 25th or 30th percentile, which is usually our cutoff for Discount Qualia or for learning disabilities, whatever happens to be looked at in the evaluation.

9:30So I know those scores would be outside of the acceptable range. However, I know from other tests that I've taken getting into graduate school and SAT performance and things like that, that my other score areas outside of math usually land in the 97th percentile. But there would be enough of a discrepancy between those two to make the learning disability really stand out. Now I've been studying Discount Qualia for more than a decade, probably close to 15 years of being solidly in this camp, not even just trained as a classroom teacher, understanding the pedagogy, understanding how to teach adult learners, understanding math, just really deep diving into this learning disability. I did not think of myself as being in that camp because of those negative terms that have

10:31been put on me by pretty much everyone I knew, especially all the adults around me, from day one, not to put a blame on other adults and teachers at that time, nobody was talking about any of these things. Even ADD and ADHD did not exist as something we talked about when I was in the K-12 system. So I can look back through that lens of what I know now and see where a lot of my issues and my friends where they had issues where things came from. We just didn't know. When you know better, you do better and you can't know until you know. That's why the DTRI works so hard at awareness around Discount Qualia and around the truth about neurodivergence. That's why we do so many of our social media reels in so many different platforms and speak at as many conferences as I can get to and get the word out in as many spaces as

11:36possible. It would have completely changed my trajectory, had I known, had anyone around me known, when I was younger, what the issue was, and how to help me get around that barrier. Now, of course, from this vantage point today, I have to be grateful for the way things went because if someone had held me out before, I never would have been able to do the work that I'm doing today, which I find highly gratifying. I love working with my students of all ages and I still tend to work with older students and adults more than elementary. We'll save that for another podcast episode, partly because I still don't like that kind of work. I find it to be the least interesting part of math and one day I'd like to retire so I can't start working with younger students or I'll never be able to get them across the finish line in retirement fashion.

12:39So there's lots of reasons for why I choose which grade levels I work with. So I need to make a second edition of my book and change that introduction. I need to get the word out in a lot of different spaces. So hopefully I can reach other adults who are having the same experience and so that we can change the experience for younger students. That's why early identification and screening is so important. However, a lot of us don't get early identification and screening myself included. So we have to be able to help people where they are today. And make sure that Discalculia is not a barrier to upper level math. It never should be to make sure Discalculia is not a barrier to a high school diploma. It should never be. And to make sure Discalculia is not a barrier to a college degree and to careers chosen

13:42by the person not by the systemic experience around math classes. So my epiphany was really eye-opening, really clarified a lot of things. It did feel a lot like a camera lens that got clicked into the right focus and then I said, oh, wow, so many things make sense now. They really do. So if you're not sure whether or not you have a learning disability, there are lots of ways you can find out. There are a lot of screeners for dyslexia out there. There are some screeners for Discalculia out there. And then we need to get a little better at screeners for dysgraphia and dyspraxia. There's a lot of information and screeners out about ADHD or autism spectrum. So find that information, keep looking. And here's an indicator for you to keep with you. If the message you're telling yourself is that you struggle because you're lazy, that

14:49is false. If you're telling yourself that you struggle because you're fighting or distracted, that is false. If you're telling yourself you struggle because you really haven't tried as hard as you could, I mean you could try a little harder. That is false. So the minute you start having negative self-blame, that's a pretty good sign that you're on the wrong path. You want to talk to professionals, you want to look at some screeners, you want to get some more information and take an unbiased look, not through a lens of self-blame, but through a lens of what we know about indicators for learning disabilities. Get some information, talk to some people, and give yourself some grace and mercy. I'm Dr. Hanora Wall and I'm going to go read some more about myself and my newly discovered learning disability that I've been carrying around for a really long time, but haven't

15:52been paying too much attention to as it relates to myself. Thank you for listening to What in the World is Discount Coolia. If you have any questions or comments or would like to see some different topics in the future, please reach out. I'd love to hear from you. You can email me at Hanora, H-O-N-O-R-A, at the D-T-R-I dot org, or Hanora at edgeaccountlearning.com. If you have questions about our teacher training and our online math classes for students, and you can find me on a lot of social media outlets, and be sure to join our teachers support group on Facebook so that we can build capacity and a network of teachers who are understanding and helping students with Discount Coolia. Thanks for listening. See you soon.