Almost all the experts will tell you that dyscalculia is congenital. Allow me to disagree with this perception. Personally as a private math tutor I ‘cured’ a 6th grade girl and a 15 year old boy from their ‘congenital dyscalculia’. Even though they were professionally diagnosed.
In my sister-in-law’s family there is a young man who graduated computer science at the university a year ago with first class honors. This lovely guy started talking at half past three!
Think of a child who does not utter a word until the age of three and a half. And now imagine a school where you learn to speak at the age of one and a half. Fortunately, there is no such thing. What would happen to this child if such an institution existed? He was diagnosed. Maybe they would call it – dysverballia maybe disLinguistic. It sounds funny, but it’s not. Everything was done with good intentions, out of a desire to help. The best diagnosticians and therapists would come to his aid.
But imagine the mental pressure on the child who knows that most of the other children are already talking, who feels the expectations of the environment and the parents. It’s a tough mental pressure for an adult as well, let alone a young child. Of course, this is an imaginary scenario and it is impossible to know what would have really happened. My guess is that he would have stuttered for life or they would have developed another language problem
This is of course my conclusion. I cannot prove it, but on the other hand, it is also not possible to prove that dyscalculia is congenital.
As far as I understand, dyscalculia is a kind of trauma following the pressure to learn math ahead of time. All the students who needed my help as a private teacher had psychological barriers. The barriers always start to form in the lower grades. The reason for this is that the age at which children are ready to learn mathematics is not uniform. Like any other human trait it has a normal distribution. The children at the end of the distribution will acquire dyscalculia because of the stress caused to them by studying mathematics long, long before they are ready for it. Just like what would have happened to a guy from my sister-in-law’s family if he had been given speech lessons before the time he was ready for it.
So what to do if my child has been diagnosed with dyscalculia.
1 – To enjoy all the benefits and concessions in the tests that come with the diagnosis
2 – Don’t believe the diagnosis:) If you don’t believe that the child has a problem, there is a chance that he will stop believing it. As long as he holds the position that he has a problem, his brain will provide him with the justification for it.
3 – Help him build self-confidence and a sense of competence in mathematics. I wrote a separate article about it.
Thanks for reading. Don’t forget it’s just math, nothing more 🙂