---

Hello, my name is Donna. I'm not sure I'm supposed to be here, really, since I haven't been formally diagnosed--I have to wait until April for the neuropsych assessement. So I might be jumping the gun by coming here. But my therapist has a strong suspicion I have a "math learning disorder." With or without a formal diagnosis, I'm feeling pretty desperate and quite alone and I'm grateful to have found this forum. I have gone back to college and started a pre-algebra class 3 weeks ago. I ended up dropping it yesterday. I crammed for 2 days straight for a quiz, but when I started the quiz I couldn't remember a thing. I might as well have been looking at something written in Russian. It was like that every day though, quiz or no quiz. I have lived, breathed pre-algebra the last 3 weeks. I even DREAM pre-algebra. But actually being able to learn it is fleeting. What I learn evaporates. Or I can't even learn it 100%, if that makes sense. I can learn enough to finish my homework for the day, but most of the time I'm just going through the motions, not really understanding why I'm doing what I'm doing. It's not sustainable and wouldn't get me through the class, though. When I was in grade school my stepdad and stepsister would take turns trying to teach me math to no avail. They'd end up yelling at me, "What's wrong with you?!! Why can't you understand?!!" I was told I was lazy, too. My stepmother would make me do math problems every day after I got home from school. If I got anything wrong she'd tell me to go back and figure it out until I got the problem correct. No help or guidance or understanding whatsoever. No wonder I have anxiety related to math. Even to this day my stepdad says, "Well, you were never good at math because you didn't like doing it!" :slaps forehead: I remember struggling terribly at math in middle school and can vividly recall the smell of one particular math teacher's breath (a mix of cigarettes and wintergreen gum) as he angrily tried to get me to understand. In high school I was put into the "Resource Room," for my math lessons, which was labled by the rest of the student body as the "retarded kids" classroom, which was pretty humiliating. I was never formally diagnosed with anything--I just wasn't good at math for some unexplainable reason. Oh, except for being LAZY and dumb. I am able to get around math in my adult years by avoiding counting change, avoiding playing games involving counting, working in career that only involves spelling and language, which I'm quite good at. But now I'm getting laid off and my profession, medical transcription, is pretty much dominated by large companies who outsource. I need to learn something new. And I am feeling SO frustrated and thwarted because of this MATH issue I have. It's frustrating. Even my husband doesn't completely understand it. He thinks it's "all in my head" because of the traumatic experiences I've encountered in my past involving math. He just doesn't understand I would give anything, ANYTHING to be able to do math. It's absolutely maddening. It's been quite a revelation to hear the therapist tell me she has a strong suspicion I have a math learning disability. It's a bit of a relief in that now I have a tangible reason for not being good at math. Now I just have to await the formal assessment and figure out what steps to take afterwards....

Thank you for listening and, again, I am so grateful to have found this web site.
Donna