I’ve been mulling over the issue of dyscalculia and how it should be taught.
I expect my ideas are heavily influenced by own experience with math….which was a great experience. I had so much support for math learning as a child, it felt like there was a whole group of us playing with numbers all the time. In grade 2 we were comfortable working out of grade 4 workbooks. Our small group of students had the same teacher two years in a row. By grade 6 – we were doing math in bases other than 10 …. just to keep us busy and learning!
And so it got me thinking.
Do other kids get exposed to math in a form other than base 10?
Do any adults know other counting systems exist?
We’ve come a long way from scratching IIIIIIIIIII on a stone wall to count our clan members. Even the Romans with their advanced system of counting still tripped over MCMLXXXVIII instead of 1988. We have a reason for why these symbols mean what they do and why our system is expressed the way it is. It might be eye opening for kids to play with other systems. It might be enriching to challenge kids to come up with their own system. Lets start a conversation about numeracy….lets really play with numbers and counting and grouping.
It might expand the vocabulary of how we describe and define a 1 next to a 0 by taking a look at the binary system – by looking down at our fingers and realizing why we have ten symbols. This could open up a whole new way to describe the event that triggers the changing of Place Value from the units to the “tens” to the “hundreds”…..it might start to make sense of what all these strange symbols mean!?
Start here http://betterexplained.com/articles/numbers-and-bases/ to see a full explanation of what I’m talking about:
From the above link….. you may agree with my thought that what we have forgotten to really teach kids about ….is the 0. It is not a throw away number, it is not “nothing”. It is the true beginning of counting. It is an essential place holder. It is what makes our modern day system work so efficiently. And it grounds our counting charts to see 0 10 20 etc 100 all lined up down the left hand side.
So no I haven’t developed a whole new curriculum or a whole new vocabulary…but I do think we need to think about it…We need to play with it…We need to become more comfortable with our base 10 system….and we definitely need to train math teachers to be more comfortable and aware of how to play with numeracy…..so that kids can be more comfortable with it as well.
Just as truly understanding reading and writing begins with tearing our language down to the smallest subset of sound (the phoneme) we need to tear math down to its smallest subset and honestly grasp what we are talking about when we count from 0 to 9 and why and when we move over one place (“tick over” as stated in the article) to begin the process again. Just as our language has rules, so does math, but missing the basic set up of our numbers system can be the true cause of starting out “way off base”.
For more reading on this topic: http://www.ldonline.org/article/5838/
Dyslexia Education 