Edit: it appears that this is not exclusive to ADHD.
Posting this meme stemmed from my own efforts to explain my thought process when doing math and how it is similar to other people with ADHD doing math, while being different from every neurotypical person I’d talked to on the same subject.
While I didn’t make the meme itself, instead finding it in my saves and wanting to share, I did accidentally spread misinformation that I had only backed up with personal anecdotal evidence.
I’ll leave this up just so people can see the explanation below but this appears to not be ADHD related and just due to different people doing math in their heads differently…
That’s the smart way to do math. I mean not with such small numbers but you’d do the same thing adding up large numbers, you break down the numbers and rearrange them in a way that’s easier to compute.
Algebra probably feels intuitive to you.
They’re also trying to teach that in math classes (it gets called “new” math) but the boomers are freaking out because “why can’t they just do normal additions like we used to, this is so complicated”. And the answer to that is, 99% of the time you’ll be doing algebra because we literally all carry a calculator in our pockets and sometimes on our wrists at all times and we never need to just do a long division. And that kind of thinking really makes it easy to break down formulas because your brain thinks in terms of moving stuff around in an equation.
So, as a childless Xennial, I have to ask… is today’s “new math” the same “new math” that people complained about in the 60s?
https://youtu.be/W6OaYPVueW4
If so, that’s an awfully long time for something to be shunned as “new.”
Truth. I recently got a neuropsych evaluation and part of it was an unexpected (to me) IQ test. And staring me in the face, for the first time in ~30 years, was a few pages of arithmetic problems. Took me a minute to recall how to do decimal multiplication but it did come back to me. Long division? Nope. Had no freaking clue. Given that it was timed I just left blank anything I couldn’t work out in my head. Maybe if I had time for trial and error I could have eventually figured it out. But one thing is for sure… the odds of me ever needing that skill again are fairly low.
I had the same thing happen in grade 12. I had a shitty teacher for calculus, so I went to Kumon to try to get help with learning calculus.
They said I needed to do their placement test to figure out where I start on their program, even if I just wanted the calculus booklets. And on it they asked me to manually do decimal multiplication and long division. It took me a minute to remember how to do long division (I’d only done short division for many years, and even that was years ago at the time.) Because it took me so long to complete it, they had me starting on grade 5 math or something ridiculous.
It’s predatory what they’re doing, imho. A proper test should be to give students a practice version so they can refamiliarize themselves with the content first. Then they’d get an accurate assessment, but they’d rather start students too low so they can scare parents with how far behind their kids are, then rocket the kids forward with lots of easy successes on things they already know so they can show off how amazing their tutoring results are. What a scam.
isn’t the problem specifically that some people just can’t really do intuitive math for small numbers? like all through school everyone else just breezed through memorizing the multiplication tables and i just sat there manually adding numbers together and felt so fucking stupid and worthless in math class
Yeah, everyone pops at their own time. Not everyone gets it quickly.
My daughter is finding this right now; fluency with small numbers isn’t coming to her quickly, so we’re doing extra review at home to help. Not many parents are equipped to help with number fluency games, though, so it’s unfortunately not unusual for many kiddos to hit fractions (or algebra) before they have strong number sense and math hits then like a truck.
If it helps, anyone without significant intellectual delays can learn number sense and work their way back up the math ladder from there. You could go back and work on decomposition of 10, 20, and 100, skip counting forwards and backwards in this progression: 10, 5, 2 (even numbers), 2 (odd numbers). Then for the rest, start with 9, but then from learn from any number: 3/4, 5, 6, 8/9, 7. (You start learning the bigger ones by building off 2s: Skip counting by 3 is 2+1, 4 is 2+2, 8 is 10–2, 9 is 10–1, 7 is hard, but if you have fluency skip counting by 5 from arbitrary numbers, then it’s just 5+2.)
I hope that makes sense. A full mental math progression is explained in the Jump Math for Home books at the middle school level.