Edit: it appears that this is not exclusive to ADHD.
Posting this meme stemmed from my own efforts to explain my thought process when doing math and how it is similar to other people with ADHD doing math, while being different from every neurotypical person I'd talked to on the same subject.
While I didn't make the meme itself, instead finding it in my saves and wanting to share, I did accidentally spread misinformation that I had only backed up with personal anecdotal evidence.
I'll leave this up just so people can see the explanation below but this appears to not be ADHD related and just due to different people doing math in their heads differently...
That's the smart way to do math. I mean not with such small numbers but you'd do the same thing adding up large numbers, you break down the numbers and rearrange them in a way that's easier to compute.
Algebra probably feels intuitive to you.
They're also trying to teach that in math classes (it gets called "new" math) but the boomers are freaking out because "why can't they just do normal additions like we used to, this is so complicated". And the answer to that is, 99% of the time you'll be doing algebra because we literally all carry a calculator in our pockets and sometimes on our wrists at all times and we never need to just do a long division. And that kind of thinking really makes it easy to break down formulas because your brain thinks in terms of moving stuff around in an equation.
the smart way to do math
the smart way to do math is called "use a calculator, sweatyy"
....Sweetie, you need to learn to spell more than to learn math.
This. I went from 50s and 60s to high 90s in my last 2 years of high school math because we were getting taught wave functions and real science math finally and all you need to know there is how to figure out which formula to use and which numbers to plug in. I'm terrible at basic arithmetic but crush algebra and later got good at food math by necessity. Also just finding ways to not count as much helped. Like when doing catering we would store plates in basically giant poker chip sets on wheels. People used to stack em in randomly until I finally figured out the closest multiple of 10 you could get to in a stack before going over the top. It was 70 plates and each dolly or whatever had 4 slots for stacks, so if all was in place each was 280 which made getting the plates ready for events way quicker cause people didn't have to manually count them, just use your 7 times table and then count the remainder to add or subtract. Once I figured out that you don't necessarily NEED the math you learn in school but if you remember to use it, it can really fucking speed things up. Also all math should be represented as algebra from the start, instead of 2+2= and leaving a blank space phase it as 2+2=x and solve for x. I think more complex algebra wouldn't scare kids as much if they knew they were kinda doing it all along.
isn't the problem specifically that some people just can't really do intuitive math for small numbers? like all through school everyone else just breezed through memorizing the multiplication tables and i just sat there manually adding numbers together and felt so fucking stupid and worthless in math class
I think so, but I'm so deep on the autism spectrum that I'm probably SCUBA-certified, so...
7 is closer to 10 than 6 so we consider that 7 is really just a 10 with a size-3 hole in it and we fill that hole with 3 from the 6 giving a 10 with 3 left over which make 13.
Also not an ADHD thing.
That's just called using heuristics, friend, though if ADHD impeded their progress in math, maybe ADHD people rely more on heuristics than neurotypicals do.
If you know those five intuitively, adding and subtracting become automatic even with adhd.
1 + 9 = 10
2 + 8 = 10
3 + 7 = 10
4 + 6 = 10
5 + 5 = 10
Interesting, I make sets of 10. When I see 7 and 6, half of the 6 moves over to make 10 + 3. I say "moves over" because it feels like dividing tokens into sets in my head.
Elementary school had us using tokens for math constantly and it made it way harder for me. Especially cause 'showing our work' meant basically drawing the lil tokens on paper that were either black or white I think black represented a minus and white represented a plus (on paper, they were red and yellow irl). So I ended out doing the equation different and then reverse engineering the method they wanted from me.
