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This is a very personal story and I’ll keep it personal because I don’t know what anyone else’s lived experience is. If you’re young and this resonates for you,
by ianpenney 2y ago
This is a very personal story and I’ll keep it personal because I don’t know what anyone else’s lived experience is. If you’re young and this resonates for you, you’ll figure it out.
My undiagnosed dyscalculia combined with an unnecessarily difficult calculus course at mun.ca cost me my degree. All other requirements met.
Yeah I am throwing shade because I was made to feel stupid by callous faculty when I fully understood why you’d want tests for sequences and series but just couldn’t hack those exams and assignments where they threw three curveballs per problem.
I grew to understand trig in high school by programming a rotating cube on a Sharp calculator. It ran at .5 fps. My teacher passed me because it was clear I had a grasp.
I would have done better at UofT - I compared their curriculum after the fact. One maybe two curve balls per question. Just couldn’t afford it.
I still have to use my fingers to count basic addition and subtraction. I can’t read an analog clock unless I really think about it. I have immense problems remembering the names of people I just met.
Luckily, at the time, I had a history of good IT admin work to make up for it.
And 25 years later, I am very happy with how my career has gone, no letters to my name.
It’s good to see someone else’s famous and major success despite such a burden.
For anyone else, get whatever exemption you can. Lord knows the golf caddy of their rich parents’ friends do the same.
I’d be as bitter as the prof who smoked cigars in his office, but my Cayley medal still hangs on the wall as a reminder of something that would take way too long to put to words.
- ianpenney 2y agohttps://www.clac.ca/Your-voice/Article/wired-to-work-differently-dyscalculia https://www.clac.ca/Your-voice/Article/wired-to-work-differe...
- MrVandemar 2y agoYeah, a lot of my experiences tally with yours. I'm undiagnosed. Not interested in a formal diagnosis, and I seldom mention it. The only reason I have any inkling that I have this condition is that my wife was listening to a radio programme about it and said "Come and listen to this! This is you!". But yeah, I think of the time I spent trying and failing to do relatively difficult maths and feeling miserable about it, because I "needed" it for a programing career makes me unhappy. I can still do logic, so programming was just fine (until the lecturer asked us to write a program to solve a quadratic equation. Fortunately, that never came up in my actual career for some reason). Don't let anyone tell you that you need mathematics for programming, it's actually not as highly correlated as people believe. Reasoning about SQL joins or writing your own SSG or other programming tasks are step-by-step. Recursion, that makes my head hurt though.
- mig39 2y agoI don't how MUN is today, but in the early 90s, there were very few accommodations. It was an eye-opener for me when I got off the island, and experienced how far ahead the rest of Canada was with respect to accommodations, accessibility, and inclusion in education. I'm glad you made it despite MUN. That could have been their slogan in the 80s and 90s.
- khazhoux 2y agoI'm surprised at the remembering names part. That seems different. FWIW I used to have a terrible time remembering names. Then someone pointed out that it helps to actually pay attention when people are introducing themselves. One simple trick!