Let me copy a piece of a blog post by someone who has suffered the whole formative years without being detected with dyscalculia:
I’d like to take a second to list all the people I wish had known more about dyscalculia growing up:
My first grade teacher, who noticed when on a verbal counting test that I went from 99 to 100 to 200 and told my parents I just needed a little practice
My third grade teacher, who couldn’t understand why I would turn in a timed multiplication table test with absolutely nothing written on it, or burst into tears when asked to bring it home and have it signed by my parents
My school corporation, who placed me in advanced mathematics for two excruciating years based on aptitude tests, apparently unaware that aptitude and ability are not one and the same
My fifth grade teacher, who privately admonished me for “laziness” because I couldn’t stop making “silly mistakes”—like switching multiplication and addition, or flipping numbers like three and eight, or failing to follow every step of a math problem
My sixth grade math teacher, who publicly called me out for writing the formula for the Pythagorean Theorem on my hand, claiming I didn’t study, though I had spent five hours the night before preparing
My parents, who grounded me every time my report card came out, trying their best to discipline what they thought was laziness
My family doctor, who, once told about my math troubles, prescribed me ADD medication without any running any kind of diagnostic
My Algebra teacher senior year after I was diagnosed, who claimed that giving me extra time on my test would be “unfair to the other students”
Every teacher who ever laughed and pointed at the clock when I asked them what time it was….. read the whole post HERE
There are unfortunately many stories like this. Our educators should play a leading role in preventing this from happening in the future.