October

The month of so many birthdays in my family. It starts with the first October & ends with the 31th every year. But yesterday I found a new significance. It is the month of learning disabilities awareness month.

Chetana Sachidanandan is a scientist at CSIR Institute of Genomics & Integrative Biology. She has written a beautiful article of learning disabilities. They are disorders of the brain that affect the ability of a normally intelligent child to learn despite having the resources & conditions to do so.

She has illustrated it with two children, Riyaz & Mithu.They have dyscalculia. Numbers are a mystery to them. It is a well-established Specific learning disorder (SLD ) & six percent of school age children may be affected. It doesn’t get diagnosed easily – after all many of us find mathematics tough. Only a certified Clinical Psychologist can find it using standardised tests.

Maths requires imagination,visualisation & abstraction. Then there are symbols.But it is more than just difficulty with maths. There are problems with working memory making it hard to keep track of multiple instructions such as those in the cooking video.

There may be spatial & visual orientation deficits like Mithu has tough time imaging different perspectives or following directions. Riyaz is not good at seeing patterns & grouping things based on shapes & sizes.

Dyscalculia may be with dyslexia or dysgraphia. Dyscalculia runs in families; often one diagnosis leads to revelations across the family. Brain scans of people taken while solving simple arithmetic problems show that dyscalculics use different regions of the brain to process math problems compared to neurotypical people. The connectivity between different regions of the brain may be different in dyscalculics. Very little is known about the neurobiology of dyscalculia.

Mithu remembers the pitiful looks she would get from her teachers & family. All the times when she had to make excuses for turning up late to activities because she could never estimate time or distance. All the times when she felt stupid & dumb.

Riyaz was fortunate to be diagnosed early. The school counselor started working with him to overcome his maths anxiety.He gets extra time to complete his exam paper. He can choose the easier ‘basic’ level maths for Class 10. He may decide to drop maths & substitute it with other subjects offered by CBSE.

Mithu is studying to be a filmmaker. She has always been artistic. She sings, paints & writes poetry. One day, she aspires to be India’s own Steven Spielberg. He was also with learning disabilities! But that did not deter him from his path nor came in the way of his success!!