LSU EDCI 7055 Progress Blog

    "If the answer is DYSCALCULIA , what is the question?" What are you wondering?  Have you heard of dyscalculia? How about dyslexia? I'd like you to take a journey with me.  Let's travel to understood.org to imagine what it feels like to have dyscalculia.  Please click  here . As a mathematics teacher of elementary and middle school students, I was fascinated to feel the frustration and confusion of a student with dyscalculia (a specific learning disability in mathematics) through the understood.org application. We know that dyscalculia is as prevalent as dyslexia or ADHD (3 - 6% of the population), and yet relatively little is known about dyscalculia ( click here for an NIH study on dyscalculia ).  So often we hear children and adults say "I just can't do math" when in fact they may simply have a form of dyscalculia.  My focus this semester is on brain development and how we can best help our students with dyscalculia. In our m...

This blog will be used to log some of my personal thoughts and growth in the area of human development and the brain, and how it specifically relates to education.  As a math teacher interested in students with specific learning disabilities in math, I am thrilled to be learning about brain plasticity and how we can take advantage of the fact that the brain can change an adapt. We have recently watched a TEDx talk about a woman who claims she "changed her brain". https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=o0td5aw1KXA Barbara Arrowsmith-Young claims that she cured herself of certain debilitating special needs she called a "brain block".  Ms. Arrowsmith-Young believes that the brain can grow new pathways to not just work around, but CURE deficiencies such as those seen in schools. I think this is a fascinating field of study, however, if it were as easy as simply exercising targeted areas of the brain to grow a new pathway, why can we not yet c...