Dyscalculic. Dyscalculia or math disability is a specific learning disability involving innate difficulty in learning or comprehending simple mathematics.

Signs include:
- Incapacity to grasp financial preparation or budgeting
- Difficulty with conceptualizing time and judging the moving of time. Can be chronically late or early
- Frequently unable to grasp and remember mathematical concepts, rules, formulae, and sequences
- Difficulty navigating or mentally ‘turning’ the map to manage the direction that is current than the common North=Top usage
- Inability to concentrate on mentally tasks that are intensive
As in: ‘we am beginning to wonder if I’m dyscalculic because I cannot appear to enhance my math SAT score, despite all of my studying.’
College as Job Training
Interesting conversations happening in the comments of this post, one of which has to do with whether or not college should be job training.
Being a liberal arts degree holder, I’d like to believe that my young ones could have that same opportunity, if they were therefore inclined. In my fantasy world, they utilize summer internships to explore career options and get to study art, history and literature in university. Am we dreaming?
Elise, an engineer, and commenter below, is the mother of 3 kids that are successful one of who got an 800 in the math SAT and it is valedictorian of his course. She believes college is career training.
Thankfully, The Chronicle of Higher Education just published the Median Earnings by Major, for the virtually minded.
Learn to Mastery, add 20% then More Research Time
A couple of weeks ago, my pal Catherine said, ‘Debbie, it’s time to read Daniel Willingham.’
Willingham is a professor of cognitive psychology during the University of Virginia. His website is just a treasure trove of useful information about just how we learn.
From Willingham’s article, What Will Improve A student’s Memory:
Wanting to remember some-thing does not have bearing that is much whether or not you will actually remember it….Here’s the way you should consider memory: it’s the residue of thought, meaning that the more you consider something, a lot more likely it is that you are going to remember it later.
Pupils allocated, on average, simply 68 percent of the time needed seriously to get the target score. We are able to sum this up by saying the third principle is that people tend to think their learning is more complete than it really is.
The last strategy to avoid forgetting would be to overlearn…..Students should learn it took to master the material until they know the material and then keep studying……A good rule of thumb is to put in another 20 percent of the time.
The article that is whole definitely worth the read.
I’ve been doling out the tips like little Scooby treats to my son, as he prepares for finals. Surprisingly, he’s interested and is using the advice.
The Benign Cousin to Rote Knowledge
The more I read Daniel Willingham, the more I understand why the SAT is really so hard for me personally. I will be lacking the foundation knowledge that I must issue re solve on these tests.
From Willingham’s article on Inflexible Knowledge:
A more benign cousin to rote knowledge is what I would call ‘inflexible’ knowledge. On top it may appear rote, but it is maybe not. And, it is vital to students’ education: Inflexible knowledge seems to end up being the unavoidable foundation of expertise, including that component of expertise that enables individuals to fix novel problems by making use of current knowledge to new situations—sometimes known popularly as ‘problem-solving’ skills.
Knowledge is flexible when it can be accessed out of the context in which it absolutely was discovered and applied in new contexts. Flexible knowledge is of program a desirable objective, however it is not an effortlessly achieved one. When encountering new material, the human brain seems to be biased towards learning the surface features of problems, perhaps not toward grasping the deep structure that is important to produce knowledge that is flexible.
Over Twenty Thousand Students Took SAT Prep in China This Past Year
As my SAT scores continue to plateau, despite months of study and determination (and large amount of fun), I’ve stomped my foot and declared on a lot more than one occasion: ‘Who are all these kids rocking the SAT and exactly what are their parents feeding them?’
Week from May 5, 2011 Business:
Twenty thousand students took SAT prep in China with ‘New Oriental’ last year, representing at the very least a 90 % share of that market……
‘New Oriental appears to have cracked the code that is SAT’ claims Phillip Muth, associate dean for admissions at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Its 1,200 candidates from China this had an average of 610 out of 800 on the SAT’s reading section and 670 in writing, as opposed to 641 in reading and 650 in writing for U.S. applicants year. In mathematics, an average was achieved by them of 783, compared with 669 for U.S. students. ‘
It’s not lost on me either that English is a language that is second.