Dyscalculia

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You know you have dyscalculia when you are counting some very easy math at work yet you still manage to make a mistake somewhere, even after checking. My supervisor often asks me if I can count. Yes, I can count, but I'm still going to somehow produce a weird mistake somewhere. It seems to be a lot of brain work for me.

But I don't mind my supervisor getting frustrated with my poor attempts at math, because I feel the same way when people can't spell, if they're native English speakers and don't struggle with dyslexia. I'm good at spelling but a lot of people aren't and it really gets up my nose lol.

I have Dyscalculia too and it is annoying.

Today I had to ask someone to help me to compose a math question.

We have to book out any cleaning supply we take out of the stock room at work, and write down how many you take out and then how many is left. There were 14 packs of 10 cloths but I had difficulty figuring out how to calculate it on my phone, so I asked another worker and she said to calculate it as 10x14, which I then remembered the "add a 0 whenever multiplying by 10" rule and then I worked out that the answer was 140, although I used my phone calculator anyway just to be sure.

I know it is such a simple sum to work out but as I was taking it out of the stock room I suddenly became confused and my mind went blank. This is a regular occurrence with me.

My spelling is very good though, compared to a lot of people of my generation and younger.

I can't count the number of times I've had problems with dyscalculia

I also have dyscalculia dyslexia in reading or writing down a sequence of numbers in the wrong order. Especially getting adresses and phone numbers wrong. Unless that's just part of dyscalculia.

I feel embarrassed and dumb because of my dyscalculia. And my home country's flip-flopping between the Metric and Imperial Systems doesn't help. I've seen how much Europeans love making fun of Americans for not understanding Metric, while I understand things measured in pounds, inches and feet more than I do kilograms, centimeters and meters. Yet when I go to the store, everything is in kilograms and liters, while temperature is measured in Celsius and distance in kilometers and so on.

I remember watching an American sitcom as a teenager where they were saying it was freezing cold outside and I was confused because they were saying the temperature in Fahrenheit, which made me think it was warm. And when I tried to cook some frozen pizza in the oven I was wondering why it was taking so long because I had set the heat of the oven, which showed only Fahrenheit, on the height setting for Celsius after reading the directions on the box.

And I hate when things are shown in only "military time", as they call it in the US, since I didn't really know how to tell "regular" time on a non-digital clock until I was maybe 12 or 13 years old. My parents did not like it when I said "3:45" instead of "a quarter to 3".