I've always struggled with math my entire life. It's so bad that if I can't count it out on my fingers I need a calculator. In school I was in special classes for it along with reading (not quite sure why I was in reading classes when I can read just fine, although sometimes words seem to run together, not like seeing them backwards like dyslexia though) and in those classes I still struggled. The highest math classes I took in school was algebra which I had to pass to graduate.

Anyway it's something I feel a lot of shame over, even if it's not my fault my brain is weird, it still does a number on my self-esteem when a child can calculate numbers better than me.

Worth noting I also have depression, GAD and OCD.

  • Red_Eclipse [she/her]
    ·
    3 months ago

    I think I might. I excelled in school and yet my math grades were always around a C. I have a hard time keeping numbers in my head, they just disappear unless i focus really really hard to keep them there. I can remember many frustrated tears shed trying to do math homework, or being the last one still working on the math test. And yeah basically I need a calculator unless I really put a lot of effort to keep the numbers in my head, but at that point it feels like you're really straining a muscle so to speak. When I'm knitting, I sometimes have to count my stitches over and over because I forgot the number halfway through counting.

    It's odd because at the same time, I'm really good at logic. I got a degree in computer science (but ended up being too autistic to get a job). I always got great grades for my programming work. I can remember taking a physics course and most of the time the math was just rearranging equations, where you're just dealing with the logic of switching the symbols around like m, t, d, etc, and plugging the numbers into the calculator. I was great at that, and even enjoyed it sometimes. But the damn numbers, man. If our physics teacher didn't let us use calculators I would have failed. So in my brain at least, it seems that arithmetic and logic are two separate things.

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
      ·
      3 months ago

      Real math (ie proofs) is completely different from computation. Stuff like the quadratic formula is just applying an algorithm to crunch out a number. In essence, it's about being a human computer, which incidentally was what the word "computer" originally meant: a human calculator.

  • AmericaHaterSexHaver [any, any]
    ·
    3 months ago

    The high school i was in put me in a math class that was loterally a free pass. Show u0 and ypu passed

    I did average to good at legit everything else so thats why i think