Dyscalculia in Adults--difficulty with math

https://www.additudemag.com/dyscalculia-in-adults-symptoms-signs-and-statistics/

• Frequently late, occasionally missing important events altogether
• Finds it difficult to remember names
• Often drives too fast or too slow, or vastly misjudges how long it will take to drive somewhere
• Needs to write down a phone number immediately to remember it
• Gets lost easily; misplaces objects around the house frequently
• Struggles to keep score in games; often loses track of whose turn it is
• Slow to tell time on an analog clock
• Poor memory for anything number-related, like dates or facts

A friend said that sounds like the signs of Alzheimer's Disease and I said, well if it is, I've had AD since I was 5 years old, including math anxiety.

My on-line statistics course through Coursera

In the statistics course I'm taking (online) I'm definitely way beyond the normal distribution and beyond the 3rd standard deviation in age.  The instructor kept assuring us we didn't need math, but since he talks about percentages and decimals and uses funny little Greek symbols, and my last math class was 1955, I sort of smile when he says that. There's some very, very basic math that I probably learned in 4th grade that I no longer remember.  When I don't understand I look it up on Google and add the word Khan (online academy for children). But I did get 100% on the Week 3 quiz--after the 2nd try. 

Now I'm in week 4, and not even sure what to Google!

Middle school is much harder than the 1950s

 
I picked this title up at Barnes & Noble a few days ago.  I made it to page 4.  Middle school is a lot harder than I remember.

Common Core Math and me

Math has always been my weak point. But I've noticed something reading some of these Common Core math problems that people ridicule. They do represent how I do some math problems, and believe me, that just isn't going to work.

Kitchen conversions—we learned in elementary school

Math refresher.

I don’t see any kitchen conversions in this Basic Match Refresher, but it does look useful without all the kiddy stuff you see on some math sites.

Getting by with too much help from their friends

When the whole IT and computer thing really kicked in with 20-somethings making money in start ups I thought young women were well positioned to go right to the top. They'd had special math and science boosts since the beginning of the 70s, workshops, summer camps, special tutoring, all manner of "leadership training" from supervisors and teachers and professors. The government went after them with Title 9 (1972). But thud. What a dud. It hasn't happened according to this article. Back in the 90s when I was still reading Wired regularly (dropped my subscription went it became mostly about hi-tech bikes and apps on phony baloney stuff) I'd look over the photos of the geekdom, or the lists of names, and really didn't see many women even though they could work from anywhere and any hours they wanted and you didn't need to worry about the good-old boys network and playing golf or tennis. Nope. Didn't happen. So now--more of the same.

"Women comprise a mere 30 percent of the information technology workforce, hold fewer than 7 percent of all IT patents and underperform in just about every measure of entrepreneurial activity in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines."

If being "risk averse" is a problem, maybe part of success is struggle--figuring out what to do on your own when it's your passion? Maybe the women who would have gone to the top have been stuck in two-fer jobs to make the masthead look good to suit all the laws and regulations? You know, vice-president for IT, just like blacks got shoehorned into vice-president for human resources.

Getting by with a little help from their friends : Ohio State onCampus

Don't look at me. I never liked math and science, and no amount of luring me into summer camp would have changed that. I sat in high school algebra II for two weeks and transferred. I'm just telling you what I observed in the last 40 years (women's movement aka modern feminism). I loved my career, lowest of the low paid (library science). And my advice to women starting out is: "You can have it all, you just can't have it all at the same time."

Why Johnny can't do math

The politics of multiculturalism

"To determine just how unbalanced teacher preparation is at ed schools, we counted the number of course titles and descriptions that contained the words “multiculturalism,” “diversity,” “inclusion,” and variants thereof, and then compared those with the number that used variants of the word “math.” We then computed a “multiculturalism-to-math ratio”—a rough indicator of the relative importance of social goals to academic skills in ed schools. A ratio of greater than 1 indicates a greater emphasis on multiculturalism; a ratio of less than 1 means that math courses predominate. Our survey covered the nation’s top 50 education programs as ranked by U.S. News and World Report, as well as programs at flagship state universities that weren’t among the top 50—a total of 71 education schools.

The average ed school, we found, has a multiculturalism-to-math ratio of 1.82, meaning that it offers 82 percent more courses featuring social goals than featuring math. At Harvard and Stanford, the ratio is about 2: almost twice as many courses are social as mathematical. At the University of Minnesota, the ratio is higher than 12. And at UCLA, a whopping 47 course titles and descriptions contain the word “multiculturalism” or “diversity,” while only three contain the word “math,” giving it a ratio of almost 16." Jay Greene, Adding up to failure.

Tinker tinker
little prof
we do wonder
why you're off.
Children flunking
basic skills
and we get
diploma mills.
Give them content
teach them math
if you deprive them
you're off the path.
.