Reply to Dsycalculia found at age 12?

Forum Index » Kids With Special Needs and Disabilities

Reply to "Dsycalculia found at age 12?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My kid was diagnosed at 10, with a whole range of disorders including dyscalculia, during his first full neuropsych evaluation. He had been diagnosed with tentative ADHD-NOS (the label used when a specialist thinks there's ADHD and autism going on but isn't quite sure) at 6 years old.

I had been re-teaching every day after school since K anyway, so it wasn't as if the diagnosis was a surprise. He was clearly dysgraphic, had severe ADHD, and had abysmally low processing speed. He read very well, so no dyslexia. It was only later that he got a formal autism diagnosis, but at the time, this was not our focus. He did get a calculator accommodation out of the dyslexia diagnosis, and the school was already giving him extra time. Some kids are given multiplication and formula tables so that they don't need to get bogged down in recall during tests and assignments, but my kid didn't have that.

Symptom-wise, for him, it was really hard to tease out what was ADHD, math disability, and low processing speed. He would take ten times as long to finish a task than the average kid. He had great difficulty memorizing his multiplication tables, but once memorized, he knew them. He did things like stare at his page and write down 1 minute equals 6 seconds. And then affirm several times that this was true... until I pointed out that he should have written 60 seconds. I will remember that episode all my life! He constantly mistook operational signs for each other, so he would look at a plus sign and understand it as a minus sign or multiplication sign. Constantly!

And yet, with extensive tutoring, he did reach AP Calc BC level in 12th grade, so I can attest to the fact that with sustained effort, an intelligent but dyscalculic kid can still do well in math. Speaking of intelligence, his IQ test had subscores that were all over the place: his verbal scores were at the 99th percentile, other reasoning scores were rather good too, except specific math stuff, his working memory was below average and the processing speed was in the single digits. The psychologist said she'd never seen a spread that extreme, and explained that the total IQ score would be meaningless in that situation (indeed, he has an "average" IQ, which doesn't begin to describe his functioning).

To be entirely honest with you, I think the diagnostic line can be a little fuzzy when there's several diagnoses at play. Is it mostly ADHD? Mostly dyscalculia? Autism? In the end, you need to be pragmatic and support your child where they need it.

[/quote]

Come ON. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics