allisonmartyjarvis

‘Tis a holiday mushroom ✨🌿🎁🍄🎁🌿✨ (Psst! It’s available on RedBubble!)

Anyway, I’m working at the movies one day and I’m ringing up this woman’s popcorn order. The computers we use at the register will automatically calculate the change for you (which was a life saver for me!) But one day I hit the wrong button or something. I asked my coworker what to do and he said that it was fine, but I would just have to calculate the change myself.

Now the woman in line must have seen the look of horror on my face because she says to me “You can do it! I’m a math teacher, you can do it!”

I thought this was very sweet but also hilarious. I don’t know how she thought telling me she was a math teacher was going to help me, also I appreciated her belief in me but she has not seen me do math!

So I laughed it off and said “Yeah, numbers are definitely not my strong suit. If math dyslexia was a thing I’m sure I have it.” To which my new math teacher friend very confidently replied “It is.”

My coworker ended up doing the calculation for me and we just moved on. I am still terrible at making change and I have no intentions on practicing. But the point of this story is that I’m just glad that that math teacher is out there. Because I’m not sure how many math teachers will actually acknowledge that dyscalculia exists. For my whole life I struggled with math classes and didn’t learn about this disability until after I graduated college. If I had known before, if my teachers had known before, it probably would have saved me a lot of struggle.

I know I like collecting stuff. Like Pokémon (gotta catch ‘em all!) it’s a major dopamine hit when I get to add something to a big collection. And I know I want to do something that involves all my favorite fictional characters. Like I know that Disney has made some apps where you collect stickers or whatever of all the Disney characters, but I got bored with those games pretty quick.