visual sequencing?

Sounds like Nonvisual Learning Disorder, do a search on NLD on Google.com and let me know if that’s what you meant :)

Sounds like it might be dyslexia — that might be worth checking out. My son and I both have it and it’s very annoying to see things a certain way and think that’s really it, only to look at it later and realize that the numbers were just opposite of the way I thought they were. The bane of my son’s existence is negative numbers because he says he doesn’t “see” the sign half the time, yet he can physically see the sign when it’s pointed out to him.

I’m with you on word problems. I can’t solve word problems unless I simplify them by pulling out the pertinent information and labelling the variables. I set up the relationships in a picture or on a timeline, and then write the equation. It’s too confusing/overwhelming for me otherwise.

Possibilities may include mild ADHD (short attention span, distractibility), dyslexia (reversals), dyscalculia, some type of subtle epilepsy like absence, petit mal, TLE (temporal lobe epilepsy), learning difficulties and so on.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/misunderstoodminds/

[quote:646a2bacf4=”darcie”]i’m a gifted young adult who has always had problems with math… i’m trying to do research into what my actual condition might be, but i’m coming up empty mainly because i haven’t found a place where i can just say “this is my symptom, now what do i have?”

i transpose numbers quite often… i noticed it most frequently the last few summers while cashiering, though it’s been going on my whole life… when i would read the total to the customer, instead of saying he owed $5.16, i would say the total was $5.61… i’ve been making constant arithematic errors all through elementary school, high school, and college, although i can easily grasp concepts in higher level math, and i think this might have something to do with a LD…

another math issue i have, which might be totally unrelated, is the inability to solve even the simplest story problem… if the problem is presented in equation form, i have no trouble coming up with the answer, even when the process is incredibly complicated, but even the easiest word problems cause me horrendous difficulty to the point where i had to drop out of a calculus class in college because all the professor’s tests were word problems…

i read something very brief about a visual sequencing condition… could this right?[/quote]

I’ve done some reading on math disabilities and their relationship to reading disabilities because of my son. If you can do complicated calculations, I dare say there is no sequencing difficulty. Your difficulty with story problems suggests either a language based difficulty or some sort of integration issue—translating verbal into visual—which is required to do word problems. My son has this difficulty as well, although he isn’t as good as you conceptually either. There are books that explicitly teach you how to conquer word problems, if it is important to you. Look on the teaching math bb.

My son also reverses numbers and letters at times, especially when he is tired. What is funny about it is he will come back to his own work and say—who wrote this like this???

My advice would be to avoid jobs that require detail work that you could mix up easily. If these are your only disabilities, I would just try to use your strengths.

Beth