Mathematics for Dyslexics and Dyscalculics, 4th Edition

16Teaching the Full Curriculum

Introduction

Faced with a dyslexic or dyscalculic child who at a young age is experiencing great difficulty with mathematics, many teachers will feel it is best to persevere with the basics of numeracy until the child has mastered them. The teacher might regard these basics as so fundamentally important that to proceed to other topics would not seem to represent the best use of time or effort. As time passes, and the child continues to experience many of the same difficulties, the temptation is to concentrate even harder on a narrow range of activities. Such a situation can continue over a period of years, during which the child is enduring constant failure and losing all confidence in himself and the learning process. The loss of confidence is a serious additional problem in a subject where confidence in performance is so important – mathematics is like walking a tightrope, in the sense that if you think you are going to fall, then you will probably fall.

Varying the mathematical diet for such a child is a course of action that may have beneficial effects of three kinds:

• It may provide him with experience of some success and bring back some confidence.
• Even more importantly, it may begin a process that gives him an alternative way of looking at the subject – a way around his problems, when there may be no way through them. If building a wall can be used as a metaphor for the learning of mathematics, then the wall of a dyslexic or dyscalculic ...