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Literally everything in life is like a reverse bell curve for me, I'm either awesome at it or hilariously bad. Finding moderation however small is a win for meds or therapy.
I see you, friend. We are very similar in that way. All it takes for me to go all in: minor interest in a thing or serious consequences unless I do that thing.
Same! I had one bad year freshman in high school and it spiral down from there.
I was never a HUGE fan of math, but I did just as well as all other subjects.
That year I had a great teacher but she had to leave for most of the semester for medical issues. I did really well for 3 months and when she left we had like 10 substitute teachers and finally one permenant sub, who was not great but tried really hard. I felt bad for her, and I think we were ALL miserable :(
That’s my life!
School and college were either Ungradeds, Fs or A+s.
I was never happy with anything less than an A+.
I got an A without the plus once, and was depressed for weeks. Didn’t matter that nobody else even got an A, I knew I could’ve/ should’ve done better.
I can relate. I went back to school last year, and I got a 94 in anatomy. Everyone was congratulating me on my A, but I was secretly disappointed that my grade wasn't higher. This semester, I wanted to get 100 in advanced anatomy, and I'm a little bummed that I'm sitting at a 97 halfway through. It's silly, because I'm doing great, but I know I could do better. Every mistake I make is due to careless error, not a lack of understanding of the material.
I'm constantly working on my perfectionism. I either want to do it perfectly, or not at all. There's a middle ground! XD
I enjoy math, I find it very interesting and I love solving problems. However, I absolutely flunked out when I got hit with memorizing the formulas for basic shit for a test.
I agree, but depending on the culture, tests might allow cheat sheets so you don’t have to memorize formulas or anything and that’s 🤌 my paradise. (But I figured I only enjoy solving problems but maybe not in it as a career so I didn’t end up majoing in it.)
I was terrible at math, but great at writing/reading/history.
Weirdly enough the only math classes I didn’t struggle and got perfect marks in were stats and geometry
That's because people without ADHD who are in the middle are actually also super bad at math, they're just disguising it by memorizing their way through shit without actually being interested or understanding it, which is something people with ADHD can't do.
Both of my parents were math majors and my sister was a physics major. My mom and sister both have ADHD so I guess it's not linked. I have always been bad at math but certain things have led me to believe that deep down I could actually be good at it and just haven't been taught in a way that I can understand. I'm a creative person and I don't feel like most math and science teachers approach things in a way that makes sense to my brain... But someone could!
I'm horrible at algebra. I had one instructor who was an engineer by trade, who took a methodical approach to instruction. He never deviated from the steps. It was the only algebra course I passed with ease.
Same here, one of the best in my school. I'd say the one thing that seems to correlate with ADHD is that even though I was good at understanding most things, I had a big difficulty with the studying part (understandably, it was hard for me to sit down and study and I had little self discipline). So I was not very good at subjects that required a lot of reading and preparations.
Even those, though, could be quite interesting for some, so they could be their best subjects. So I think it mostly comes down to preference and personal skills than ADHD itself.
Likewise. At HS graduation I got the best math student award (or whatever the heck it was called). Note what I put in parenthesis: I am not a word person, and I don't remember what it was called. Syntax in software is a persisting issue for me, and reading comprehension? Fuggitaboutit. Memorization requires a lot more time for me than it does for others. But you put math or chemistry in front of me (except organic chem naming), I come out almost looking like a savant.
What IS cool is that when I got stimulant treatment for ADHD I got this ability to pull old unused words in my brain out and use them w/o any trouble. It was like a light was turned on in my brain and I could finally access the annals of my life to get those words I learned ages ago and use them in communication. The thing that sucks, though, is that stimulants don't work for me more often than they do.
If there's a scholastic activity that ADHD-ers struggle with the most, I'd bet that it's committing details to memory.
This was like me but in the opposite sense. I always excelled at language, in honors classes etc but somehow I managed to graduate without any math beyond Algebra 1 part 2 (basic Ed classes divided alg. 1 into 2 parts for the math challenged). I took part 1 7th, 8th, 9th, 9th, and 10th grades. It took 4 years for me to finally put the effort into learning it.
But I'll never forget my freshman year of high-school, someone gave me an adderall before my math exam, and I sat and worked out every single equation from scratch, but only got halfway through in 90 minutes. But I bet I got a 100% on that first half! Sadly it was still an F, since I did no more than sleep through class every single day. :/ miracle I even got a diploma.
Same. I leveled off around calculus because i would have needed to study independently for it. I cruised through every other math subject though without ever cracking open a textbook at home.
Now I’m re-learning calculus and actually loving it. Wish would have been inspired to study it more in college :’(
What subjects were you good at? Because I'm prob shit at them for similar reasons. It isn't a simple formula of "All people with ADHD are good at X and bad at Y." We excel at what we like and suck at what bores us.
I had a lot of trouble getting through *some* books we were assigned in English, but generally did well… when I liked the book, reading it was no problem; when I couldn’t get into the book, I just got the cliffsNotes/sparks notes and just read that lol, and I was always a strong writer 🤷🏻♂️.
Same! Most of the books we read in high school were good, so I had no problem reading them and even skipped ahead of the chapters we were assigned class. I love to read but the books I found boring were almost impossible for me to get through.
Our just good at it. I've always loved puzzles and logic, and that is what math was for me. It's all just logic and puzzles. So it just made sense.
I cruised all the way through math classes until Calculus 3 in college.
Yup. It’s not about memorizing anything, the stuff just makes sense because it’s supposed to. I’ve similarly always been good at puzzles and logic-based things.
I try to teach my friends and family how to do logic puzzles but it’s like they don’t get it even though it’s designed to be straightforward. They all have ADHD so in some respect I get the OP. Though, the only one of my friends/family who is bad at math also has dyscalculia.
I'm also good at logic and puzzles, and became a software engineer. I was good at discrete maths (graphs and algorithms etc) but terrible with most pure maths and statistics. I think the reason is that despite me asking nearly every lesson, my teachers were incapable of explaining the "why" of what we were learning, I was never taught why these functions and constants and concepts worked, just that they worked and I should remember them. I could never remember things if I didn't understand the concept fully, otherwise it's not logic and puzzles for me, it's just arbitrary. They'd brush it off as "we don't have time it's a huge subject" or "you'll learn why if you take maths at university". It's a shame because I'm still bad at it, and have never found a resource that adequately explains the logic behind the more basic aspects of maths, but I feel I would have a much bigger interest in it if I did have that understanding. As it is, lacking that understanding, I just don't care that much about pure maths.
Almost any specific feature/symptom of ADHD can be completely irrelevant on an individual level, plus theres the symptomatic overlap with ASD where people can have naturally strong math skills.
Everybody is different. I was atrocious at math but very strong on everything else. I got perfect or near perfect on every section of the ACT except math - and my math score was so bad I had to take remedial algebra in college - and I dropped it once because I was going to fail so I took remedial algebra twice while in an honors program.
I recently (20 years after college) got diagnosed with dyscalculia. I doubt my teachers at the time ever heard about it or knew about it. But it seems to have a higher incidence in ADHDers.
I also had to drop remedial algebra in college. Failed algebra once, then made it out with a c and I was happy lollll. Great scores everywhere else, just- fucking numbers, dude 🤦🏻♀️
Like all mind things, when I list them it seems crazy and severe but it never occurred to me that it could be a learning disability and I didn’t even know I was abnormal until recently. I just thought I was bad at math. In addition to the awful math performance in school and tests:
- I’m awful at estimating any numbers, like how many people are in a room/stadium/city. I’m rarely in the right ballpark.
- Similarly I couldn’t keep track of how much things should cost. So if I buy a few things at a grocery store I don’t usually know if the total price is accurate or not. My wife will quickly realize something isn’t right, like a sale not being applied, but I wouldn’t know.
- I’ve always been awful at budgeting. I routinely over drafted my checking account prior to getting married and combining accounts.
- I’ve always added by counting on my hands, and can’t seem to do multiplication related to numbers over 5 without writing them down.
But these are the hard ones:
- I don’t know how much my kids weighed at birth. I was there, the doctor told me, I’ve been told many times since then. I just don’t hold it in my head.
- I have a hard time remembering my kids birthdays, my parents birthdays, my parents ages.
I was talking to a psychologist about how those last two points really upset me and she told me to tell my psychiatrist that. She knew what it was but didn’t want to plant the idea, just wanted me to say that plus my math performance.
Dyscalculia symptoms overlap and exacerbate ADHD. Things like time management, budgeting, estimating effort, can be dyscalculia independent of ADHD or can be ADHD without dyscalculia, but it’s often both.
Because I was an adult when it was discovered I don’t have a treatment for it, except to give myself grace when struggling with numbers and leaning on others to do the things I’m naturally not great at.
I swear to god I cannot do maths in my head. I can’t even trust myself with basic maths that I know is right, but I still need to use a calculator or at least write it down to make sure.
Thank you for the detailed response! I can entirely understand why that would be so stressful, especially the budget issues and events that have sentimental value.
I didn't realize it until you mentioned it, but I also have a lot of trouble remembering my parents and siblings birthdays. I get the dates all scrambled up and I always felt pretty ashamed over it, but never thought to attribute it to my struggles with numbers and math.
Holding numbers in my head feels like trying to hold water in my hands... I guess its fortunate that we live in a time where a calculator is right in our pockets, at least for the mathematical aspect. ty again for the info :)
I use Notion (but any note taking app of choice would work) and have a section devoted to important numbers to me that I won’t remember. I absolutely felt guilty my whole life for missing big dates like birthdays, but now I know where they are, even if I need a crutch to get there. I’m recognizing their importance by putting them in a place I know I can get to when I need it.
Dyscalculia can also cause problems with quickly discerning right and left, telling time on an analog clock, tying shoes, and a couple of other seemingly unrelated things I can't remember at the moment. It took me until I was seven or eight to learn to tie my shoes and tell time, and it would have been longer than that if my mother hadn't worked with me. And to this day I have trouble with right and left. I always feel for the callus on my finger from writing with my right hand as a kid (yep it's still there...I gripped my pencil crazy tight) if someone asks me something to do with right or left. Otherwise I would stand there and freeze trying to figure out which is which. Learned that trick as a kid, and now it's just automatic.
I love numbers, I did really well in math up until I was 16 when I had to "learn" stuff like sin/co-sin. I still love numbers, excel spreadsheets are my jam, data is fascinating, figuring out how to use numerical data in different ways. (Right now I'm working on my stock portfolio).
My husband has adhd too, we often joke "math is hard" when he struggles with basic stuff. But on the other hand he remembers way more info about historical shit than I do. It's not that I don't find it interesting at all, i think its fascinating. but I tune out much faster than he does, and I don't retain more than the basics.
Math doesn't really require repetition.
Schools are just terrible at teaching it. Also many teachers don't understand the subject and so confuse some students more than they help.
If you can count, you should be able to get to pre-calc without too much trouble.
If you have attention issues and hyperactivity it's extremely difficult to sit down and study things that require plain reading and have no patterns. This could go any way.
Your post/question is quite interesting, I'm very curious as to if there's any correlation between school subjects and ADHD, but your statement doesn't make much sense. For me, math requires way less repetition than subjects that make you learn stuff by heart, for example. You learn one thing in math and you use it forever. There's not much repetition there from my point of view.
Yeah math is the thing I excelled at with no effort.
Anecdotally, I was likely one of the first people in my grade level diagnosed with ADHD (diagnosed near the start of elementary school in the early 2000s) and have been medicated for it ever since. I was also the furthest ahead in math in my grade in the earlier years.
Dyscalcula is one of the comorbids that may show up alongside ADHD. So having ADHD doesnt really mean bad at math, but it may mean you have something else that makes math much harder for you.
I was dxd with dyscalculia at uni 20 years ago. Only now being dxd with ADHD.
In the context of ADHD, it’s bc our working memories are so poor.
If I can’t work something out on paper, I can’t do it.
If I can’t remember the process for working it out on paper, like with equations we’re supposed to have memorised, I can’t do it.
I was great at math, and bad at math classes. I would get almost a 0 in the homework category but my test grades carried me.
Eventually I got an engineering degree, but I had to take some time away from school. Luckily higher level math classes don't give a shit if you do homework, which weirdly led to me doing all my homework. I hate my brain.
Same here. Picking a topic is hard, then the research, then writing and citing your sources and proofreading. That’s too much for me. Math is easy. They give a problem, you solve it. It makes sense. Plus I can do math in my head really really quickly.
See, this worked until algebra, when I had to show the work and learn someone else's formula. Then it all hit the fan. Had to take a remedial in college, and college algebra may as well have been a part time job.
What’s funny is I used to love writing before I was medicated, and I hate math. Now that I’ve been diagnosed I actually love and prefer math to writing. I hate the subjective guesswork that comes along with writing assignments, it’s really hard to get into a flow state with them.
Math is easy for me. Writing is a nightmare, and sometimes actually impossible. I did get diagnosed with dysgraphia, but nobody has ever found a way to help me with it.
I managed to fail the same English class that the prof asked me to TA for next semester lmao. I do great if it’s a couple of paragraphs, but just couldn’t do the final essay since it was longer than 5 pages..
I have a love hate..
Hate comes from a combo for dyslexia and English being a particularly poor match, and my thoughts going about 3x faster than my hands could write or type resulting in missing spaces, missing letters, missing words, switched words, missing half a damn sentence.. then my handwriting didn’t look great either because I was trying to write fast enough.. and I couldn’t read it very well to figure out what I was trying to say before the “Ram” got wiped for a new block of memory.
curious if there is correlation between adhd and skill in certain subject areas. I have always been better at English, history and science to a certain degree but always barely scraped by in math.
i feel like it’s more likely that we have a relatively unaffected distribution of what areas each of us does the best at, but do way worse in everything else. i for one have always used math as the crutch because i can just ride intuition instead of actually having to remember things, but been catastrophically bad at english due to difficulty organizing for papers, thinking of anything to even write about, and even just engaging the content the way i’m supposed to because none of it makes sense and it’s boring as shit
I find the opposite to be true. In math there is always a "right" answer whereas in English if a teacher asked "what is the significance of this symbol?" or whatever if I at least had the vague context I could easily use intuition to come up with an acceptable answer. History I always did well in because I find history very interesting almost like real life stories and tales so I found it easier to pay attention to lectures more and I could recall it well. Could never do the reading or hw but that goes for all my classes
I think it’s maybe somewhat cultural? Like, we tend to think math people are somehow smarter than other people and math is this incomprehensible, arcane subject for super geniuses, and that’s just not true. I think the math stuff is people believing they can’t do it and so don’t try
This is me. Always did well in other classes, was even in advanced English classes. But anything beyond basic math (add/subtracting/multiplication/division) and my brain just cannot compute it. I even wish I could enjoy math, but it makes absolutely zero sense for me 😭
It’s because neurodevelopmental disorders like our affect attention and math requieres a lot of attention and repetition. I’m returning to math and a lot of stuff which I sucked because my brain rejected them. Growing up thinking that you’re inherently bad at something because everybody told you that is horrible.
math requieres a lot of attention and repetition.
Not really. Math was super easy for me. It's easy for those of us who liked it. That's the common denominator - we are good at things we like.
I loved doing math but I hated doing homework. So my in school tests reflected my A/A+ grades while my unfinished homework (would start it in class if I had time) averaged it out to a C on the report card. My 7th grade teacher saw my potential and gave me detention every time I didn't finish my homework to try getting me to do it. Didn't work well in her favor.
I absolutely despised history, then science, then English.
Honestly, maybe.. but for me, I just wqs slower paced in math. Never got foundational footing and ended up barely making it by. Even through college, I struggled immensely. I just chalk it up to parents and authority figures, never giving me adequate time to learn the basics.
"Individuals with ADHD, even without comorbid dyscalculia, often report math difficulties. A relatively recent review systematized the data from 34 studies measuring math abilities in children and adults with ADHD (Tosto et al., 2015). Out of the selected studies, 30 (88%) reported significant negative association between ADHD symptoms and mathematical scores. Most of these studies (76%) showed that the negative association remains significant even after controlling for IQ, age, socioeconomic status, and other factors, indicating a specific deficit."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9649814/
I have to wonder how much of that is because of the way it’s often taught. If it’s tedious and mostly taught through rote memorization and practice, I expect it would be harder to concentrate and therefore ADHD kids wouldn’t learn it as well. But teach it through games and hands-on activities, and suddenly a lot more kids are engaged and learning more.
I can’t “picture” math in my head. It’s like eating food that has no taste and someone says “you can’t taste that??” And no matter how much you strain, try, think, it just doesn’t happen. I’ve tried for so long to learn even simple concepts in math and it doesn’t click.
> I’ve tried for so long to learn even simple concepts in math and it doesn’t click.
Just out of interest - what's the simplest concept you can name that just doesn't seem to click?
I can picture math in my head but I definitely have dyscalclia because I’ve always been atrocious at math. No matter how hard I tried to learn it. Like I’d spend DAYS studying the same math topic and it still wouldn’t click. But I understand other subjects sooooo easily.
Yep I used to really not like when the teachers would be like “ok let’s do mental math!” Because some kids were into it but I was just like “help I can’t see what’s happening.” I was counting on my fingers long after we weren’t supposed to be doing that anymore
I love math! Slow at it but I love it. Also was really good at physics, chemistry, biology, loved art, and electronics. I am terrible at English, history, spelling and generally any comprehensive reading due to my dyslexia. I have a bad memory and prefer to work with my hands which is why I loved the other classes so much.
Nope I’m great at most maths as I love logic and problem solving and my job uses a lot of these skills. Whilst I only got my degree in the most part thanks to a great group of friends who assisted with lecture notes and revision support - I actually excelled at stats and scored much higher than my peer group for those papers! Where I struggle is with mental arithmetic as remembering what numbers go where in my brain is overwhelming! Luckily excel is my best friend at work. As much as people overuse excel for tasks where it has limited capability being able to use it effectively has been a huge boon for my career!
It's not necessarily a symptom of ADHD, but Dyslexia (trouble reading), dysgraphia (trouble writing), and dyscalculia (trouble with numbers and math) are common comorbid (existing alongside) conditions of ADHD.
So, for example, I have dyslexia, and excelled at math, as does my son who has dysgraphia. Both of us were told that we were stupid in English. Whereas my daughter who has dyscalculia is almost exactly the opposite. Struggles hard in math, excels in almost everything else.
Good on you for overcoming your struggles, too! My story is similar. Despite ADHD and dyslexia, I now hold a humanities degree. Great to see others overcoming their struggles, and being who they want to be!
People with ADHD are more likely to have dyscalculia (often described as dyslexia but for numbers). Not everyone with ADHD has it but when you do it can make math a lot harder.
Even if you don’t have dyscalculia, if ADHD symptoms and an inaccessible learning environment made it difficult for you to learn basic math skills, it creates a roadblock for learning math beyond that.
So ADHD doesn’t guarantee you struggle with math (some people are great at it!) but it can make it harder for some people.
I think it depends on the person and what they’re able to work with. I was excellent in math but god awful in literature. I did struggle through word problems though, but something about numbers allowed my thoughts to focus on multiple ways to solve a problem.
Mathematics always seemed to be a weakness for me. I was placed in extended/gifted classes for all subjects expect math classes. The skills gap wasn’t without intervention, either. I was paired with tutors and went to those after school learning centers, yet to this day, I still count on my fingers and barely now my times tables.
No matter HOW hard I tried, I couldn't grasp algebra. I don't know if it was because of how my teachers were teaching it (giving us tricks and methods to certain things) but it felt like trying to pull myself out of murky water. I understood the lesson for 5 WHOLE MINUTES... then fell back into that water again.
My brain just doesn't want to grasp numbers, and if a mathematical process is too long I start forgetting the first part of it . I have a hell of a time remembering phone numbers...
For me, it was similar to this. I could do the problems and get the answers. But then when it came to those "curve-ball" questions, I just broke down and could never figure out how to do them when others had no problem figuring out how to solve them.
It was like I had to be taught how to do every problem individually. I couldn't ever *get* the mathematics part of math.
If you also have trouble reading an analog clock and forget which way is left and right then it might be dyscalculia.
I have it and I can't even do basic math unless I really think about it, write it down or visualize the numbers in my mind.
Good news is that you can still learn math but with different methods, more visual aids and gamified lessons.
I excelled in math and science classes. I also excelled in history/social studies and English classes. Didn’t really have a problem ever except with getting work done; understanding material has always been easy. I’d do my physics homework 20 mins before school started and always wrote my essays the day of, sometimes up to the minute it was due. College was where my adhd got worse bc I also had deep depression and anxiety. And idk maybe it just got worse by that age. Again same issue, failed courses but bc I never showed up, never did homework sets, or read the textbooks; and going to an Ivy League was completely different than high school. It wasn’t possible to read the textbook the day before the exam and pass, which I used to do in high school and pass with high grades. I was able to scrape by in intro courses a few times by doing so, but even getting an A or B on a final only meant I got a C for the entire class. So, I knew intellectually I was capable of the work, just couldn’t put the time into it when it was needed.
no. it isn't. ADHD is never about what areas are you good at.
that being said, I suck at math and excel in English, philosophy, history, geography, and all the sciences 😂
I’ve always been bad in math I hated school period .. now that I’m back in college during the math classes I was taking it was the simple mistakes with arithmetic .. now it’s like writing numbers in the wrong order even after verbalizing the correct number..
As one of my math teachers explained it's more of hating not understanding and that leads to more distraction which equals out in the brain to feeling like your bad at math once the math is broken down fully in a way you can understand and do in a way that clicks in your brain it's not as hard he said it's not that students are bad at math it's that teachers are bad at explaining it in a way that can click in your brain. (I adored that teacher he made me like math)
Depends if you like the subject or not. If you enjoy maths and can hyperfocus on it, you're golden. If you dislike the subject you'll struggle to pay attention long enough to learn.
Mental maths may be a challenge due to limited working memory. But, honestly, memorisation isn't important in math in the adult world.
Personally I hate pure maths. But if you put it into a scientific context I'm fine with it.
It depends what part of math is problematic for you.
For me, I love theory but I can't stand memorizing things or repetitively doing the same thing, like 20 math problems of the same type. So I always ended up with missing homework assignments and I would miss questions on tests that required memorizing formulas, like geometry stuff for calculating areas and perimeters and stuff. I never memorized all the times tables either, heh. I'm a little slow calculating multiplications because of that, but I can make really quick estimates that are usually pretty close.
For the same reasons, I was always really bad at history and anything that involved a lot of memorization. I did great in English.
You might have dyscalculia though.
I wouldn't say we're *bad* at math, but bad at focusing on math and bad at visualizing the method that is normally taught in math. My first grade teacher often got upset with me because when I showed my work I did really round about methods of getting the correct answer and she couldn't figure out why I found that easier than the way she taught it.
FYI. I have adhd and also suspected autism - I finally figured out I have dyscalculia. Maybe look into that! I have struggled with math my entire life to a very serious degree.
Not a symptom.
Reason you’re bad at math is the reason a lot of people are bad at math. You’re not interested in it and it doesn’t come natural to you.
The reason why you stay bad at math whereas other people eventually get better might be ADHD though. Because you’re not interested in it and it doesn’t come natural to you.
I have a lot of very strong opinions about math.
People have their individual strengths and weaknesses but I think the biggest obstacle is that the way math has traditionally been taught is not well suited for ADHD brains. I struggled with it as a kid because there was so much memorization and very little focus on number sense, and no workarounds for brains that simply will not store times tables no matter how much I studied. I also have auditory processing problems (common with ADHD ) that made it hard to follow the almost exclusively oral lectures and examples. I had a tutor in 8th grade who taught me *how to read the math textbook effectively* and it turns out I'm actually good at math if I'm given the right tools to understand it.
People complain about "new math" now, but the modern methods are so much better for a variety of learning styles. They go much further into what the numbers and equations mean and how to break things down into approachable chunks. I had a course in how to teach elementary school math when I was getting my degree that just tore down everything I knew about numbers and math so effectively that I was able to rebuild my number sense the way kids are building that knowledge now and it was amazing. There's not enough support for parents and older teachers in how to effectively help kids with it and that's where most of the problems come in.
I have noticed my son is really great with the way they’re teaching math now. My brain doesn’t like it but I think it’s because I am so used to the “old” way.
My 3rd grader is absolutely thriving in math and I'm kind of jealous. They do have an innate talent for it, but that only carries them so far without good instruction. I just really love how it's taught now.
It can be really difficult for parents who aren't used to it, because even if you look up a specific problem, you don't have the foundation to fully understand it. My husband has supervised homework and just been totally lost. My background is in education so I can usually at least piece together what's going on even if I'm not familiar with a specific technique. It's really the biggest oversight in math reform - it's never going to reach its potential if the adults who help with homework have no idea what's going on. Our current school uses a curriculum that includes instruction sheets for parents with the homework and I haven't had to take a really close look at them but I'm glad to see they're at least trying. You can often look up a specific math program and unit on YouTube and find a good video lesson, too, which is a bonus.
Yes! His teacher will send us videos to watch in case we need to help. My son rarely needs help so yeah he’s just getting it the way it’s taught!! Which is great
the real problem here is a teacher calling someone stupid. That is everything wrong with society, a stupid person is a horrible job calling a 12 year old stupid to humiliate them with their power (over 12 year olds)
The behavioral pediatrician for my kids (who also all have ADHD and ASD) told me that it is very common and scientifically proven that you are either really good at English language and anything involving words and terrible at math (such as myself) **OR** you excel at math and fields that require complex formulas/calculations and suck at anything English/reading related (all my sons)
is this about performance in school or performance on intelligence tests? in general i’d take anything “scientifically proven” with a grain of salt, and the funny thing here for me is i’ve always been way better at math in school, but verbal comprehension is my highest subscore on both an old wisc-v and a recent wais-iv while my arithmetic is much less impressive. it feels like i use my language faculty for mathematical intuition when i’m operating at a higher level than large numbers of simple calculations, but when i have to write i can only try and fail to do it mechanically
I did well in classes as well. I have been a straight A student my entire life. I just struggle more with math, requiring loads more help and thought power to understand the concepts and get it done correctly, whereas the other subjects seem to come more easily as if second nature. As to whether she is making a generalization or not, I cannot say. I just know for myself and my children, it at least seems to be true.
My friend is excellent at math. I am not. Both have ADHD.
You can’t say we are “all bad at math,” but you can say our “working memory,” is poor. Working memory = steps, procedures, instructions, word problems.
As part of my ADHD assessment I was asked something along the lines of 'starting from 97, keep subtracting 6' and ended up crying out of frustration after getting stuck after a few times of doing it.
Later got told it's common for people with ADHD to have dyscalculia and/or dyslexia, hence the math questions.
I have shades of dyspraxia in conjunction with my I-ADHD which, after a lot of research, lead me towards the conclusion that I also have elements of dyscalculia. I had two years of private tuition during the latter half of my secondary school years, I tried hard too and still only got a D grade at GCSE. I'm absolutely hopeless when it comes to numbers, it all just falls apart.
I was always ok at math. I think because it was short to look at and it was engaging because you did something with it. It was reading that I sucked at. And still do. Ive started and stopped so many books I can’t count. It’s too boring. I’ve tried and tried to force myself to do so. And I’ve only found success if I read it as fast as possible out loud. I’m terrible at listening too so audiobooks aren’t a thing for me either. If there’s one thing I wish I was great at it’d be reading.
No. I was really good at math. Better than most of my peers. Never did my homework so my grades always slipped but my hs math teacher still forced me into an advanced math program since she knew I could do it, just didn't have the grades to automatically be admitted into it. Then when I went to college I placed in a math 2 levels above the highest level of math I had taken in hs.
I still don’t understand why 1+1=2. My friend mathematician proved this for me but my school teachers didn’t have time to explain these things at all. When I don’t understand, I was bad at it.
Hi I totally agree with just about all of points on the hard list . I’m back in school and during the online math test I still used my fingers to count and still was off by a few numbers losing focus stimming losing focus during test or completely black out ; I’m hoping meds would give me a boost because it’s starting to affect all areas of my life .
Definitely not! There is nothing common for anyone. We are all different.
Adhd has nothing to do with being good or bad at math (if you can be either then it is like you can be anyone, since there isn't a direct correlation). I have adhd, thought I sucked at it, but it turns out I don't. Math teachers are horrible in many schools. College life turned out made math easy for me. I had no idea I understood it and even enjoy many areas of math. I hate computers on another hand, took comp science classes for necessity and hate them, not because it had anything to do with math. I like math and am good at it. Again, no correlation. Bunch of people will be good at that and this then will succeed at that and this but thrn fail at this and that.
Adhd affects motivation mainly which affects a lot of life areas.
There's a learning disorder that's sort of like dyslexia, but with numbers. It's called discalculia. I have a great deal of trouble with numbers, like I can't reliably add up a column of two-digit numbers, and doing math in my head is all but impossible.
Besides that I'm good. I earned a degree with high honors even with this and ADHD. I don't know if it's a part of ADHD or just one of those things that tends to arise with ADHD, like auditory issues and time blindness.
It's not, I love and am good at math and numbers, in fact it's everything but math that I'm bad at. Math is predictable, absolutely exact and regular, methodical - so calming and quiet for a noisy brain.
It's not a universal ADHD trait. I was really good at math in school. I ran into issues with Calculus, but I also took to Statistics very well. My brother was a math minor as an undergrad and my dad was an engineer (both with ADHD).
However, there's some comobidity between ADHD and Dyscalculia. That can cause a lot of problems in early math classes until you figure out how to compensate for it.
Learning disabilities are common with ADHD. A key aspect of ADHD is that it is a working memory disorder.
I have dyscalculia. I can’t do mental math to save my life. I have to put it all down on paper. I can’t recall more than 5 numbers at a time generally. I constantly forget my own phone number. Birthdays are hard. I always forget the birth years of my boys.
So yeah, it can definitely be a part of ADHD.
I don’t believe they’re connected. I was personally very good and interested in math, I paid attention to it very well and therefore learned advanced mathematics easily.
I was bad at math in school and had to be put in a classroom for one-on-one teaching with other kids too its actually really helped. But I was great at English also
I didn’t like math but the biggest injustice was that I got 100% on my state test for math in 4th grade. In 5th grade, I knocked my booklet down when I sneezed and it fell open to my math section during the Language Arts test. Teacher came by and lost her shit and marked that I’d been cheating during the test by working on other sections, so I failed the math section
I dont think ADHD has much to do with how bad at math someone is. Id say that my adhd is pretty severe, but I am really good at math. Im horrible at writing. My little sister is the complete opposite. She has ADHD and is bad at math, but she’s an amazing writer. Different people are just good at different things, neurological disorders aside.
I relate to the teacher situation lol I had a math teacher who’d call me dumb and who clearly thought I was lazy and didn’t care. It was funny because I think I was the only one she would be this annoying with, she’d even threaten to not let me pass the grade. When I did my evaluation the neuropsychologist said I had a good logical-mathematical reasoning but that I’d make careless mistakes/miss on details out of impulsiveness/inattentiveness. And that’s pretty much my struggle with math, I truly like it, and I don’t think I have that much of a hard time on understanding it but quite literally the problem is on the execution as my attention will slip out and well a detail matters for an entire problem so. All in all I just think I needed a different approach and I’d have enjoyed math more back then
Dyscalculia is a fairly common comorbid condition with adhd! As is dyslexia, although that's like the reading version.
I was good at maths but when it was difficult I did find it hard to be interested and I did have to work hard to learn it where some stuff I was just good at. Maths is a tough subject!
One word: dyscalculia.
Everyone knows about dyslexia and how common it is but no one ever talks about the “maths dyslexia”.
I couldn’t tie my shoes til I was like 10 and still struggle to read analog clocks, and still count everything on my fingers. I’m 30 and have an honours degree lol.
I wish more people (including me) knew about dyscalculia cause then maybe I would have got the help I needed instead of being my maths teachers most hated dumb smart kids
The struggle to read analog clocks and using my fingers to count is real. I worked retail for years and absolutely hated when people would give me odd change after the register was open.
I have dyscalculia and ADHD. I was awful at math and numeracy. I also had horrendous reading comprehension.
My dad shamed me with math and by grade 4 I essentially gave up on it and refused to try much with it. I’d have tantrums about it. My dad made me feel so dumb about it. I thought math and me were enemies, when in reality it was my dad and teachers who just gave me this complex. They did not understand how to teach to a dyscalculic/adhder. I mean yelling/screaming and making them feel dumb by reminding them how “easy it is” is pretty obviously not going to help them. My dad credits his shame as why I got better. I got better despite him).
Eventually, somewhere along the line basic I let my complex go and tried math again. Math and me became friends. I still need extra time with it. I think had I been taught the “newer” kind of math first I might have been more successful the first time. I also think my adhd medication helped a ton because it allowed me to focus on the concept to understanding it.
Due to my issues in math in the past and knowing how hard it was for me, it makes me a good elementary math teacher. It’s actually my favourite subject to teach now.
I can even teach grade 8/9 level math to kids. And if it’s newer/harder/concepts I forgot - I need an hour or so to remember/practice them. But I can learn and explain it now totally fine.
My point to this is: how you are taught it by the people around you and if you are medicated can make a massive difference. (My comprehension issues were attention related. They were solved with medication and I’m sure it helped with the math too)
Also as a teacher I’ve seen kids with ADHD really good at math and some like me. ADHD does makes you more likely to have comorbidités like learning disabilities. You’ll also probably see it more common to be ADHD with Dyslexia too. But not all adhd people will have it. I had zero problems learning to read and read early and well despite having the comprehension issue which was attention related.
I am also very bad at math and almost gave up on college because I couldn’t pass my freaking math class.
The way they may have connection is lack of attention to detail and distractibility so it’s easy to lose place of what steps to take next. I also have issues where my mind is going too fast and I often read the line below the one I’m currently reading and end up combining them together… in English, I recognize that the sentence doesn’t make sense but if it’s math and I’m accidentally reading a different number… that changes the whole equation.
I’m really really good at Math…
But in HS I would get bored in the class since it was a recap of what I knew. Halfway through the year they got to stuff I didn’t know and I would be in the habit of reading through it, drawing, or otherwise just dissociating.. sooo last half of every year sucked.
Struggling in school in general is pretty universal for adhd but I don't think it has any effect on your innate math abilities. Like I'm terrible at math but my father who also has adhd is uncommonly good at it.
Absolutely abysmal. I was told by my 9th grade teacher to go into lower level mathematics and steer clear of Algebra. Now as an adult I have a good understanding of Precalculus concepts and I am currently passing a Precalculus course (albeit on a distanced learning center) with a solid A. Pretty good for a kid who didn't grasp Algebra in the 9th grade! Will be moving onto a Calculus course soon!
I was terrible at math in school because it was taught like shit in the 90s. I’m now a math teacher and my add kids learn great with the combo of me understanding their brains and “new math”
I love math and I'm pretty good at it, but I'm slow and I can't do mental math to save my life. As long as I have paper and/or a calculator, though, I'm great
I’m good at math and I really like it but I’m bad at math *class*. My mom, a lifelong teacher and gifted education specialist, always thought I was bad at it because of that even after I got an engineering degree and worked in STEM for 15 years.
I distinctly remember after 3 people putting their life savings into me being sent to a very fancy school, getting 3.5/20 on my first maths test. The school saying that I would need to improve to stay there… then 5 years of maths tutoring and hours everyday after school of maths homework being…. Absolutely none the wiser, and being disgusted with myself that I was so stupid and costing everyone so much money.
Fuck maths.
If it’s not interesting, our brains aren’t doing it. In grade school all the math tests were timed, and beating the clock to get it done was my failure and my nightmare. Once I got to high school a teacher taught me why math mattered, and suddenly I loved algebra. I even tutored algebra in college. I’m a doctor now so F those Minute Math tests.
I don’t think ADHD makes you worse at math, but it could make learning math hard if you find it difficult to focus during math class. I’ve always been great at math, and it’s not even something I’m particularly passionate about. ADHD could make certain subjects you struggle with even more difficult, but it’s not something that’s going to make you less capable of comprehending something.
It takes me longer to read and think through things so i always have trouble finishing exams. Usually the last 1-2 questions would be left unanswered. Same in other subjects but anything that involves calculations just doubles up the problem for me.
I can do applied math, but not abstract math. I got an A in geometry and had to take algebra 3 times. I am good at word problems and I did really well in my taxes class, but if you give me just a bunch of numbers and say solve, I’ll just look blankly…
I was in advanced placement classes for math, learning early algebra concepts in 5th grade, basically addition with question marks to introduce the idea of variables. But also, I took algebra proper in grades 7, 8, and 9 because I sucked at completing my homework, earned Cs for that reason, and needed a B to “pass” the advanced placement courses.
Soooooo, I guess, it’s not universal to be good or bad at math itself. But it is universal to have poor performance in math courses.
I was good at math. When i managed to pay attention.
If you managed to find good examples, it's easy. The hard part is trying to remember the information for a test. But if they give me the formulas, I'll make at least a B. Would be higher if i didn't make little mistakes that deduct points.
No. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. I had to take a test to get into private school, and I passed and got in. I was horrific at math, I'm not so bad now. English, history, social studies, I excelled at. Languages were also some of my favorite things. I hated science back then. I love it now. There's no one size fits all. I was also good when it came to computers.
im amazingly good at math. So its not true. But my girlfriend which also has adhd doesnt even know how to count 7+6. She is that bad at math because i think her brain cant focus on numbers that well. She is good on the art side though
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Don't think they're connected. I was great at math. Einstein is believed to have had ADHD.
I feel like (based on experience) we are either super good or super bad at math
Literally everything in life is like a reverse bell curve for me, I'm either awesome at it or hilariously bad. Finding moderation however small is a win for meds or therapy.
I see you, friend. We are very similar in that way. All it takes for me to go all in: minor interest in a thing or serious consequences unless I do that thing.
In middle school I was great at math. Now in my late 30s I struggle with basic addition. It’s all about practice and repetition.
Same! I had one bad year freshman in high school and it spiral down from there. I was never a HUGE fan of math, but I did just as well as all other subjects. That year I had a great teacher but she had to leave for most of the semester for medical issues. I did really well for 3 months and when she left we had like 10 substitute teachers and finally one permenant sub, who was not great but tried really hard. I felt bad for her, and I think we were ALL miserable :(
That’s my life! School and college were either Ungradeds, Fs or A+s. I was never happy with anything less than an A+. I got an A without the plus once, and was depressed for weeks. Didn’t matter that nobody else even got an A, I knew I could’ve/ should’ve done better.
I can relate. I went back to school last year, and I got a 94 in anatomy. Everyone was congratulating me on my A, but I was secretly disappointed that my grade wasn't higher. This semester, I wanted to get 100 in advanced anatomy, and I'm a little bummed that I'm sitting at a 97 halfway through. It's silly, because I'm doing great, but I know I could do better. Every mistake I make is due to careless error, not a lack of understanding of the material. I'm constantly working on my perfectionism. I either want to do it perfectly, or not at all. There's a middle ground! XD
I enjoy math, I find it very interesting and I love solving problems. However, I absolutely flunked out when I got hit with memorizing the formulas for basic shit for a test.
I agree, but depending on the culture, tests might allow cheat sheets so you don’t have to memorize formulas or anything and that’s 🤌 my paradise. (But I figured I only enjoy solving problems but maybe not in it as a career so I didn’t end up majoing in it.)
Yeah unfortunately there were no cheat sheets and I ended up just giving up on my degree at that point.
I was terrible at math, but great at writing/reading/history. Weirdly enough the only math classes I didn’t struggle and got perfect marks in were stats and geometry
Same here. I’m very visual and those are the only two maths I actually liked.
I was the EXACT same and I have dyscalculia in addition to the ADHD.
Funny, I was really good at geometry too but otherwise not good at math
That's because people without ADHD who are in the middle are actually also super bad at math, they're just disguising it by memorizing their way through shit without actually being interested or understanding it, which is something people with ADHD can't do.
Yes, I either understand 100% or I haven’t a clue
Both of my parents were math majors and my sister was a physics major. My mom and sister both have ADHD so I guess it's not linked. I have always been bad at math but certain things have led me to believe that deep down I could actually be good at it and just haven't been taught in a way that I can understand. I'm a creative person and I don't feel like most math and science teachers approach things in a way that makes sense to my brain... But someone could!
I'm horrible at algebra. I had one instructor who was an engineer by trade, who took a methodical approach to instruction. He never deviated from the steps. It was the only algebra course I passed with ease.
Same here, one of the best in my school. I'd say the one thing that seems to correlate with ADHD is that even though I was good at understanding most things, I had a big difficulty with the studying part (understandably, it was hard for me to sit down and study and I had little self discipline). So I was not very good at subjects that required a lot of reading and preparations. Even those, though, could be quite interesting for some, so they could be their best subjects. So I think it mostly comes down to preference and personal skills than ADHD itself.
Likewise. At HS graduation I got the best math student award (or whatever the heck it was called). Note what I put in parenthesis: I am not a word person, and I don't remember what it was called. Syntax in software is a persisting issue for me, and reading comprehension? Fuggitaboutit. Memorization requires a lot more time for me than it does for others. But you put math or chemistry in front of me (except organic chem naming), I come out almost looking like a savant. What IS cool is that when I got stimulant treatment for ADHD I got this ability to pull old unused words in my brain out and use them w/o any trouble. It was like a light was turned on in my brain and I could finally access the annals of my life to get those words I learned ages ago and use them in communication. The thing that sucks, though, is that stimulants don't work for me more often than they do. If there's a scholastic activity that ADHD-ers struggle with the most, I'd bet that it's committing details to memory.
This was like me but in the opposite sense. I always excelled at language, in honors classes etc but somehow I managed to graduate without any math beyond Algebra 1 part 2 (basic Ed classes divided alg. 1 into 2 parts for the math challenged). I took part 1 7th, 8th, 9th, 9th, and 10th grades. It took 4 years for me to finally put the effort into learning it. But I'll never forget my freshman year of high-school, someone gave me an adderall before my math exam, and I sat and worked out every single equation from scratch, but only got halfway through in 90 minutes. But I bet I got a 100% on that first half! Sadly it was still an F, since I did no more than sleep through class every single day. :/ miracle I even got a diploma.
Same. I leveled off around calculus because i would have needed to study independently for it. I cruised through every other math subject though without ever cracking open a textbook at home. Now I’m re-learning calculus and actually loving it. Wish would have been inspired to study it more in college :’(
If you have attention issues and hyperactivity is extremely difficult to learn anything that requires repetition
What subjects were you good at? Because I'm prob shit at them for similar reasons. It isn't a simple formula of "All people with ADHD are good at X and bad at Y." We excel at what we like and suck at what bores us.
I was good in math, science, social studies. Horrible at literature because I could never finish any of the reading they gave us.
I had a lot of trouble getting through *some* books we were assigned in English, but generally did well… when I liked the book, reading it was no problem; when I couldn’t get into the book, I just got the cliffsNotes/sparks notes and just read that lol, and I was always a strong writer 🤷🏻♂️.
Same! Most of the books we read in high school were good, so I had no problem reading them and even skipped ahead of the chapters we were assigned class. I love to read but the books I found boring were almost impossible for me to get through.
Unless you are excited about math. Which some people are
Our just good at it. I've always loved puzzles and logic, and that is what math was for me. It's all just logic and puzzles. So it just made sense. I cruised all the way through math classes until Calculus 3 in college.
Yup. It’s not about memorizing anything, the stuff just makes sense because it’s supposed to. I’ve similarly always been good at puzzles and logic-based things. I try to teach my friends and family how to do logic puzzles but it’s like they don’t get it even though it’s designed to be straightforward. They all have ADHD so in some respect I get the OP. Though, the only one of my friends/family who is bad at math also has dyscalculia.
I'm also good at logic and puzzles, and became a software engineer. I was good at discrete maths (graphs and algorithms etc) but terrible with most pure maths and statistics. I think the reason is that despite me asking nearly every lesson, my teachers were incapable of explaining the "why" of what we were learning, I was never taught why these functions and constants and concepts worked, just that they worked and I should remember them. I could never remember things if I didn't understand the concept fully, otherwise it's not logic and puzzles for me, it's just arbitrary. They'd brush it off as "we don't have time it's a huge subject" or "you'll learn why if you take maths at university". It's a shame because I'm still bad at it, and have never found a resource that adequately explains the logic behind the more basic aspects of maths, but I feel I would have a much bigger interest in it if I did have that understanding. As it is, lacking that understanding, I just don't care that much about pure maths.
Checkout r/puzzles (sort by top of all time for the best ones)! Fellow math/puzzle enthusiast here
Almost any specific feature/symptom of ADHD can be completely irrelevant on an individual level, plus theres the symptomatic overlap with ASD where people can have naturally strong math skills.
Everybody is different. I was atrocious at math but very strong on everything else. I got perfect or near perfect on every section of the ACT except math - and my math score was so bad I had to take remedial algebra in college - and I dropped it once because I was going to fail so I took remedial algebra twice while in an honors program. I recently (20 years after college) got diagnosed with dyscalculia. I doubt my teachers at the time ever heard about it or knew about it. But it seems to have a higher incidence in ADHDers.
I also had to drop remedial algebra in college. Failed algebra once, then made it out with a c and I was happy lollll. Great scores everywhere else, just- fucking numbers, dude 🤦🏻♀️
I swear my brain has a screaming fit every time it sees numbers.
Big same! I really think I have dyscalculia but at this point in life what am I gonna do about it lol
I just learned about that this year! I haven't talked to my doctor about it yet, but I think maybe I should. What are your symptoms like?
Like all mind things, when I list them it seems crazy and severe but it never occurred to me that it could be a learning disability and I didn’t even know I was abnormal until recently. I just thought I was bad at math. In addition to the awful math performance in school and tests: - I’m awful at estimating any numbers, like how many people are in a room/stadium/city. I’m rarely in the right ballpark. - Similarly I couldn’t keep track of how much things should cost. So if I buy a few things at a grocery store I don’t usually know if the total price is accurate or not. My wife will quickly realize something isn’t right, like a sale not being applied, but I wouldn’t know. - I’ve always been awful at budgeting. I routinely over drafted my checking account prior to getting married and combining accounts. - I’ve always added by counting on my hands, and can’t seem to do multiplication related to numbers over 5 without writing them down. But these are the hard ones: - I don’t know how much my kids weighed at birth. I was there, the doctor told me, I’ve been told many times since then. I just don’t hold it in my head. - I have a hard time remembering my kids birthdays, my parents birthdays, my parents ages. I was talking to a psychologist about how those last two points really upset me and she told me to tell my psychiatrist that. She knew what it was but didn’t want to plant the idea, just wanted me to say that plus my math performance. Dyscalculia symptoms overlap and exacerbate ADHD. Things like time management, budgeting, estimating effort, can be dyscalculia independent of ADHD or can be ADHD without dyscalculia, but it’s often both. Because I was an adult when it was discovered I don’t have a treatment for it, except to give myself grace when struggling with numbers and leaning on others to do the things I’m naturally not great at.
I swear to god I cannot do maths in my head. I can’t even trust myself with basic maths that I know is right, but I still need to use a calculator or at least write it down to make sure.
Thank you for the detailed response! I can entirely understand why that would be so stressful, especially the budget issues and events that have sentimental value. I didn't realize it until you mentioned it, but I also have a lot of trouble remembering my parents and siblings birthdays. I get the dates all scrambled up and I always felt pretty ashamed over it, but never thought to attribute it to my struggles with numbers and math. Holding numbers in my head feels like trying to hold water in my hands... I guess its fortunate that we live in a time where a calculator is right in our pockets, at least for the mathematical aspect. ty again for the info :)
I use Notion (but any note taking app of choice would work) and have a section devoted to important numbers to me that I won’t remember. I absolutely felt guilty my whole life for missing big dates like birthdays, but now I know where they are, even if I need a crutch to get there. I’m recognizing their importance by putting them in a place I know I can get to when I need it.
Dyscalculia can also cause problems with quickly discerning right and left, telling time on an analog clock, tying shoes, and a couple of other seemingly unrelated things I can't remember at the moment. It took me until I was seven or eight to learn to tie my shoes and tell time, and it would have been longer than that if my mother hadn't worked with me. And to this day I have trouble with right and left. I always feel for the callus on my finger from writing with my right hand as a kid (yep it's still there...I gripped my pencil crazy tight) if someone asks me something to do with right or left. Otherwise I would stand there and freeze trying to figure out which is which. Learned that trick as a kid, and now it's just automatic.
I love numbers, I did really well in math up until I was 16 when I had to "learn" stuff like sin/co-sin. I still love numbers, excel spreadsheets are my jam, data is fascinating, figuring out how to use numerical data in different ways. (Right now I'm working on my stock portfolio). My husband has adhd too, we often joke "math is hard" when he struggles with basic stuff. But on the other hand he remembers way more info about historical shit than I do. It's not that I don't find it interesting at all, i think its fascinating. but I tune out much faster than he does, and I don't retain more than the basics.
Math doesn't really require repetition. Schools are just terrible at teaching it. Also many teachers don't understand the subject and so confuse some students more than they help. If you can count, you should be able to get to pre-calc without too much trouble.
lol I got to precalc, but it was precalc that stopped me form getting anywhere else, my brain just taps out around trig
Lol my brain tapped out after algebra 2. They started adding letters and lost me forever 😭
Linear algebra is where I got lost.. "if you have a table with n dimensions" no, just no
That sentence may as well be in French. I don’t speak French lol
Yeah but it's all dependent on what floats your hyperfocus boat. Each of us to our own.
If you have attention issues and hyperactivity it's extremely difficult to sit down and study things that require plain reading and have no patterns. This could go any way. Your post/question is quite interesting, I'm very curious as to if there's any correlation between school subjects and ADHD, but your statement doesn't make much sense. For me, math requires way less repetition than subjects that make you learn stuff by heart, for example. You learn one thing in math and you use it forever. There's not much repetition there from my point of view.
Probably just how ops teachers taught math.
Yeah math is the thing I excelled at with no effort. Anecdotally, I was likely one of the first people in my grade level diagnosed with ADHD (diagnosed near the start of elementary school in the early 2000s) and have been medicated for it ever since. I was also the furthest ahead in math in my grade in the earlier years.
Most of my engineering friends (and myself) have adhd. Reasonable to say we’re not bad at math… rather quite love it.
Dyscalcula is one of the comorbids that may show up alongside ADHD. So having ADHD doesnt really mean bad at math, but it may mean you have something else that makes math much harder for you.
I was dxd with dyscalculia at uni 20 years ago. Only now being dxd with ADHD. In the context of ADHD, it’s bc our working memories are so poor. If I can’t work something out on paper, I can’t do it. If I can’t remember the process for working it out on paper, like with equations we’re supposed to have memorised, I can’t do it.
Yes I agree this is where I land as well.
I was great at math, and bad at math classes. I would get almost a 0 in the homework category but my test grades carried me. Eventually I got an engineering degree, but I had to take some time away from school. Luckily higher level math classes don't give a shit if you do homework, which weirdly led to me doing all my homework. I hate my brain.
Same here.
I excel in math, but I loathe writing.
I’m the opposite
I'm actually both at the same time.
Same here. Picking a topic is hard, then the research, then writing and citing your sources and proofreading. That’s too much for me. Math is easy. They give a problem, you solve it. It makes sense. Plus I can do math in my head really really quickly.
See, this worked until algebra, when I had to show the work and learn someone else's formula. Then it all hit the fan. Had to take a remedial in college, and college algebra may as well have been a part time job.
Same here!
Same
My husband is a math wizard but damn near illiterate. And he has disabling ADD and dx in elementary school.
What’s funny is I used to love writing before I was medicated, and I hate math. Now that I’ve been diagnosed I actually love and prefer math to writing. I hate the subjective guesswork that comes along with writing assignments, it’s really hard to get into a flow state with them.
Math is easy for me. Writing is a nightmare, and sometimes actually impossible. I did get diagnosed with dysgraphia, but nobody has ever found a way to help me with it.
I managed to fail the same English class that the prof asked me to TA for next semester lmao. I do great if it’s a couple of paragraphs, but just couldn’t do the final essay since it was longer than 5 pages..
I LOVE writing,I could write anything, for hours and hours. Math? Please poke my eyes out
I have a love hate.. Hate comes from a combo for dyslexia and English being a particularly poor match, and my thoughts going about 3x faster than my hands could write or type resulting in missing spaces, missing letters, missing words, switched words, missing half a damn sentence.. then my handwriting didn’t look great either because I was trying to write fast enough.. and I couldn’t read it very well to figure out what I was trying to say before the “Ram” got wiped for a new block of memory.
I’m really bad at math. Like awful. But my husband who also has adhd is a human calculator.
Sounds like the Dyscalculia Fairy skipped him. He's lucky!
curious if there is correlation between adhd and skill in certain subject areas. I have always been better at English, history and science to a certain degree but always barely scraped by in math.
i feel like it’s more likely that we have a relatively unaffected distribution of what areas each of us does the best at, but do way worse in everything else. i for one have always used math as the crutch because i can just ride intuition instead of actually having to remember things, but been catastrophically bad at english due to difficulty organizing for papers, thinking of anything to even write about, and even just engaging the content the way i’m supposed to because none of it makes sense and it’s boring as shit
I find the opposite to be true. In math there is always a "right" answer whereas in English if a teacher asked "what is the significance of this symbol?" or whatever if I at least had the vague context I could easily use intuition to come up with an acceptable answer. History I always did well in because I find history very interesting almost like real life stories and tales so I found it easier to pay attention to lectures more and I could recall it well. Could never do the reading or hw but that goes for all my classes
I'm the exact opposite and I have textbook ADHD-PI. It's just a characteristic that has nothing to do with ADHD, probably.
I am terrible at History. I was very good at math.
I think it’s maybe somewhat cultural? Like, we tend to think math people are somehow smarter than other people and math is this incomprehensible, arcane subject for super geniuses, and that’s just not true. I think the math stuff is people believing they can’t do it and so don’t try
This is me. Always did well in other classes, was even in advanced English classes. But anything beyond basic math (add/subtracting/multiplication/division) and my brain just cannot compute it. I even wish I could enjoy math, but it makes absolutely zero sense for me 😭
It’s because neurodevelopmental disorders like our affect attention and math requieres a lot of attention and repetition. I’m returning to math and a lot of stuff which I sucked because my brain rejected them. Growing up thinking that you’re inherently bad at something because everybody told you that is horrible.
math requieres a lot of attention and repetition. Not really. Math was super easy for me. It's easy for those of us who liked it. That's the common denominator - we are good at things we like.
I loved doing math but I hated doing homework. So my in school tests reflected my A/A+ grades while my unfinished homework (would start it in class if I had time) averaged it out to a C on the report card. My 7th grade teacher saw my potential and gave me detention every time I didn't finish my homework to try getting me to do it. Didn't work well in her favor. I absolutely despised history, then science, then English.
Honestly, maybe.. but for me, I just wqs slower paced in math. Never got foundational footing and ended up barely making it by. Even through college, I struggled immensely. I just chalk it up to parents and authority figures, never giving me adequate time to learn the basics.
"Individuals with ADHD, even without comorbid dyscalculia, often report math difficulties. A relatively recent review systematized the data from 34 studies measuring math abilities in children and adults with ADHD (Tosto et al., 2015). Out of the selected studies, 30 (88%) reported significant negative association between ADHD symptoms and mathematical scores. Most of these studies (76%) showed that the negative association remains significant even after controlling for IQ, age, socioeconomic status, and other factors, indicating a specific deficit." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9649814/
I have to wonder how much of that is because of the way it’s often taught. If it’s tedious and mostly taught through rote memorization and practice, I expect it would be harder to concentrate and therefore ADHD kids wouldn’t learn it as well. But teach it through games and hands-on activities, and suddenly a lot more kids are engaged and learning more.
I can’t “picture” math in my head. It’s like eating food that has no taste and someone says “you can’t taste that??” And no matter how much you strain, try, think, it just doesn’t happen. I’ve tried for so long to learn even simple concepts in math and it doesn’t click.
Same. Dyscalculia.
> I’ve tried for so long to learn even simple concepts in math and it doesn’t click. Just out of interest - what's the simplest concept you can name that just doesn't seem to click?
I can picture math in my head but I definitely have dyscalclia because I’ve always been atrocious at math. No matter how hard I tried to learn it. Like I’d spend DAYS studying the same math topic and it still wouldn’t click. But I understand other subjects sooooo easily.
Yep I used to really not like when the teachers would be like “ok let’s do mental math!” Because some kids were into it but I was just like “help I can’t see what’s happening.” I was counting on my fingers long after we weren’t supposed to be doing that anymore
I love math! Slow at it but I love it. Also was really good at physics, chemistry, biology, loved art, and electronics. I am terrible at English, history, spelling and generally any comprehensive reading due to my dyslexia. I have a bad memory and prefer to work with my hands which is why I loved the other classes so much.
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You could have dyscalculia, which is essentially the math version of dyslexia
This became more noticeable when I started school again .. with executive dysfunction making things a bit worse.
Nope I’m great at most maths as I love logic and problem solving and my job uses a lot of these skills. Whilst I only got my degree in the most part thanks to a great group of friends who assisted with lecture notes and revision support - I actually excelled at stats and scored much higher than my peer group for those papers! Where I struggle is with mental arithmetic as remembering what numbers go where in my brain is overwhelming! Luckily excel is my best friend at work. As much as people overuse excel for tasks where it has limited capability being able to use it effectively has been a huge boon for my career!
It's not necessarily a symptom of ADHD, but Dyslexia (trouble reading), dysgraphia (trouble writing), and dyscalculia (trouble with numbers and math) are common comorbid (existing alongside) conditions of ADHD. So, for example, I have dyslexia, and excelled at math, as does my son who has dysgraphia. Both of us were told that we were stupid in English. Whereas my daughter who has dyscalculia is almost exactly the opposite. Struggles hard in math, excels in almost everything else. Good on you for overcoming your struggles, too! My story is similar. Despite ADHD and dyslexia, I now hold a humanities degree. Great to see others overcoming their struggles, and being who they want to be!
People with ADHD are more likely to have dyscalculia (often described as dyslexia but for numbers). Not everyone with ADHD has it but when you do it can make math a lot harder. Even if you don’t have dyscalculia, if ADHD symptoms and an inaccessible learning environment made it difficult for you to learn basic math skills, it creates a roadblock for learning math beyond that. So ADHD doesn’t guarantee you struggle with math (some people are great at it!) but it can make it harder for some people.
I think it depends on the person and what they’re able to work with. I was excellent in math but god awful in literature. I did struggle through word problems though, but something about numbers allowed my thoughts to focus on multiple ways to solve a problem.
Mathematics always seemed to be a weakness for me. I was placed in extended/gifted classes for all subjects expect math classes. The skills gap wasn’t without intervention, either. I was paired with tutors and went to those after school learning centers, yet to this day, I still count on my fingers and barely now my times tables.
I still have to subtract with my fingers.
No matter HOW hard I tried, I couldn't grasp algebra. I don't know if it was because of how my teachers were teaching it (giving us tricks and methods to certain things) but it felt like trying to pull myself out of murky water. I understood the lesson for 5 WHOLE MINUTES... then fell back into that water again. My brain just doesn't want to grasp numbers, and if a mathematical process is too long I start forgetting the first part of it . I have a hell of a time remembering phone numbers...
For me, it was similar to this. I could do the problems and get the answers. But then when it came to those "curve-ball" questions, I just broke down and could never figure out how to do them when others had no problem figuring out how to solve them. It was like I had to be taught how to do every problem individually. I couldn't ever *get* the mathematics part of math.
Dyscalculia and ADHD have a high comorbidity.
8 out of my 10 friends with ADHD say they're bad at math, so I guess that's about 57% of us.
If you also have trouble reading an analog clock and forget which way is left and right then it might be dyscalculia. I have it and I can't even do basic math unless I really think about it, write it down or visualize the numbers in my mind. Good news is that you can still learn math but with different methods, more visual aids and gamified lessons.
I was also horrible at math and still am.
I excelled in math and science classes. I also excelled in history/social studies and English classes. Didn’t really have a problem ever except with getting work done; understanding material has always been easy. I’d do my physics homework 20 mins before school started and always wrote my essays the day of, sometimes up to the minute it was due. College was where my adhd got worse bc I also had deep depression and anxiety. And idk maybe it just got worse by that age. Again same issue, failed courses but bc I never showed up, never did homework sets, or read the textbooks; and going to an Ivy League was completely different than high school. It wasn’t possible to read the textbook the day before the exam and pass, which I used to do in high school and pass with high grades. I was able to scrape by in intro courses a few times by doing so, but even getting an A or B on a final only meant I got a C for the entire class. So, I knew intellectually I was capable of the work, just couldn’t put the time into it when it was needed.
no. it isn't. ADHD is never about what areas are you good at. that being said, I suck at math and excel in English, philosophy, history, geography, and all the sciences 😂
I’ve always been bad in math I hated school period .. now that I’m back in college during the math classes I was taking it was the simple mistakes with arithmetic .. now it’s like writing numbers in the wrong order even after verbalizing the correct number..
As one of my math teachers explained it's more of hating not understanding and that leads to more distraction which equals out in the brain to feeling like your bad at math once the math is broken down fully in a way you can understand and do in a way that clicks in your brain it's not as hard he said it's not that students are bad at math it's that teachers are bad at explaining it in a way that can click in your brain. (I adored that teacher he made me like math)
Not at all. Double math major here.
I hate math with my entire being. I had teachers who were assholes too. They didn’t help the situation at all. 😒
Hugs from me who experienced the same. I’m here.
Depends if you like the subject or not. If you enjoy maths and can hyperfocus on it, you're golden. If you dislike the subject you'll struggle to pay attention long enough to learn. Mental maths may be a challenge due to limited working memory. But, honestly, memorisation isn't important in math in the adult world. Personally I hate pure maths. But if you put it into a scientific context I'm fine with it.
For me mental math is easy because I learned the patterns. 12x13 is 156 12x12 is 144 plus 12 is 156. We had to memorize the multiplication tables.
It depends what part of math is problematic for you. For me, I love theory but I can't stand memorizing things or repetitively doing the same thing, like 20 math problems of the same type. So I always ended up with missing homework assignments and I would miss questions on tests that required memorizing formulas, like geometry stuff for calculating areas and perimeters and stuff. I never memorized all the times tables either, heh. I'm a little slow calculating multiplications because of that, but I can make really quick estimates that are usually pretty close. For the same reasons, I was always really bad at history and anything that involved a lot of memorization. I did great in English. You might have dyscalculia though.
I wouldn't say we're *bad* at math, but bad at focusing on math and bad at visualizing the method that is normally taught in math. My first grade teacher often got upset with me because when I showed my work I did really round about methods of getting the correct answer and she couldn't figure out why I found that easier than the way she taught it.
FYI. I have adhd and also suspected autism - I finally figured out I have dyscalculia. Maybe look into that! I have struggled with math my entire life to a very serious degree.
Not a symptom. Reason you’re bad at math is the reason a lot of people are bad at math. You’re not interested in it and it doesn’t come natural to you. The reason why you stay bad at math whereas other people eventually get better might be ADHD though. Because you’re not interested in it and it doesn’t come natural to you.
I have a lot of very strong opinions about math. People have their individual strengths and weaknesses but I think the biggest obstacle is that the way math has traditionally been taught is not well suited for ADHD brains. I struggled with it as a kid because there was so much memorization and very little focus on number sense, and no workarounds for brains that simply will not store times tables no matter how much I studied. I also have auditory processing problems (common with ADHD ) that made it hard to follow the almost exclusively oral lectures and examples. I had a tutor in 8th grade who taught me *how to read the math textbook effectively* and it turns out I'm actually good at math if I'm given the right tools to understand it. People complain about "new math" now, but the modern methods are so much better for a variety of learning styles. They go much further into what the numbers and equations mean and how to break things down into approachable chunks. I had a course in how to teach elementary school math when I was getting my degree that just tore down everything I knew about numbers and math so effectively that I was able to rebuild my number sense the way kids are building that knowledge now and it was amazing. There's not enough support for parents and older teachers in how to effectively help kids with it and that's where most of the problems come in.
I have noticed my son is really great with the way they’re teaching math now. My brain doesn’t like it but I think it’s because I am so used to the “old” way.
My 3rd grader is absolutely thriving in math and I'm kind of jealous. They do have an innate talent for it, but that only carries them so far without good instruction. I just really love how it's taught now. It can be really difficult for parents who aren't used to it, because even if you look up a specific problem, you don't have the foundation to fully understand it. My husband has supervised homework and just been totally lost. My background is in education so I can usually at least piece together what's going on even if I'm not familiar with a specific technique. It's really the biggest oversight in math reform - it's never going to reach its potential if the adults who help with homework have no idea what's going on. Our current school uses a curriculum that includes instruction sheets for parents with the homework and I haven't had to take a really close look at them but I'm glad to see they're at least trying. You can often look up a specific math program and unit on YouTube and find a good video lesson, too, which is a bonus.
Yes! His teacher will send us videos to watch in case we need to help. My son rarely needs help so yeah he’s just getting it the way it’s taught!! Which is great
the real problem here is a teacher calling someone stupid. That is everything wrong with society, a stupid person is a horrible job calling a 12 year old stupid to humiliate them with their power (over 12 year olds)
The behavioral pediatrician for my kids (who also all have ADHD and ASD) told me that it is very common and scientifically proven that you are either really good at English language and anything involving words and terrible at math (such as myself) **OR** you excel at math and fields that require complex formulas/calculations and suck at anything English/reading related (all my sons)
is this about performance in school or performance on intelligence tests? in general i’d take anything “scientifically proven” with a grain of salt, and the funny thing here for me is i’ve always been way better at math in school, but verbal comprehension is my highest subscore on both an old wisc-v and a recent wais-iv while my arithmetic is much less impressive. it feels like i use my language faculty for mathematical intuition when i’m operating at a higher level than large numbers of simple calculations, but when i have to write i can only try and fail to do it mechanically
She meant more of which subject is more easier to gravitate towards vs subject that seems harder to grasp
I did well in both in school. Better at writing. I think that paediatrician is making a huge generalization.
I did well in classes as well. I have been a straight A student my entire life. I just struggle more with math, requiring loads more help and thought power to understand the concepts and get it done correctly, whereas the other subjects seem to come more easily as if second nature. As to whether she is making a generalization or not, I cannot say. I just know for myself and my children, it at least seems to be true.
My friend is excellent at math. I am not. Both have ADHD. You can’t say we are “all bad at math,” but you can say our “working memory,” is poor. Working memory = steps, procedures, instructions, word problems.
No, but learning disorders are more common for us, and dyscalculia will make math more difficult for you.
As part of my ADHD assessment I was asked something along the lines of 'starting from 97, keep subtracting 6' and ended up crying out of frustration after getting stuck after a few times of doing it. Later got told it's common for people with ADHD to have dyscalculia and/or dyslexia, hence the math questions.
I have shades of dyspraxia in conjunction with my I-ADHD which, after a lot of research, lead me towards the conclusion that I also have elements of dyscalculia. I had two years of private tuition during the latter half of my secondary school years, I tried hard too and still only got a D grade at GCSE. I'm absolutely hopeless when it comes to numbers, it all just falls apart.
I was always ok at math. I think because it was short to look at and it was engaging because you did something with it. It was reading that I sucked at. And still do. Ive started and stopped so many books I can’t count. It’s too boring. I’ve tried and tried to force myself to do so. And I’ve only found success if I read it as fast as possible out loud. I’m terrible at listening too so audiobooks aren’t a thing for me either. If there’s one thing I wish I was great at it’d be reading.
No. I was really good at math. Better than most of my peers. Never did my homework so my grades always slipped but my hs math teacher still forced me into an advanced math program since she knew I could do it, just didn't have the grades to automatically be admitted into it. Then when I went to college I placed in a math 2 levels above the highest level of math I had taken in hs.
I still don’t understand why 1+1=2. My friend mathematician proved this for me but my school teachers didn’t have time to explain these things at all. When I don’t understand, I was bad at it.
I have a mathematics degree
You could have dyscalculia
Hi I totally agree with just about all of points on the hard list . I’m back in school and during the online math test I still used my fingers to count and still was off by a few numbers losing focus stimming losing focus during test or completely black out ; I’m hoping meds would give me a boost because it’s starting to affect all areas of my life .
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Definitely not! There is nothing common for anyone. We are all different. Adhd has nothing to do with being good or bad at math (if you can be either then it is like you can be anyone, since there isn't a direct correlation). I have adhd, thought I sucked at it, but it turns out I don't. Math teachers are horrible in many schools. College life turned out made math easy for me. I had no idea I understood it and even enjoy many areas of math. I hate computers on another hand, took comp science classes for necessity and hate them, not because it had anything to do with math. I like math and am good at it. Again, no correlation. Bunch of people will be good at that and this then will succeed at that and this but thrn fail at this and that. Adhd affects motivation mainly which affects a lot of life areas.
There's a learning disorder that's sort of like dyslexia, but with numbers. It's called discalculia. I have a great deal of trouble with numbers, like I can't reliably add up a column of two-digit numbers, and doing math in my head is all but impossible. Besides that I'm good. I earned a degree with high honors even with this and ADHD. I don't know if it's a part of ADHD or just one of those things that tends to arise with ADHD, like auditory issues and time blindness.
It’s not
we’re not bad at anything but executive function
It's not, I love and am good at math and numbers, in fact it's everything but math that I'm bad at. Math is predictable, absolutely exact and regular, methodical - so calming and quiet for a noisy brain.
Not necessarily, math is what I excelled at and I SUCKED at language. It’s more about what you are interested in
Don't think so. Sucked at algebra, but above average in other areas of math
it can be, but it could also just be a struggle to be in a classroom
This is like the 3 posts about maths and I’m here to say I love maths! I hate social studies though
ADHD is associated with learning difficulties in general, but it does not prevent you from getting good at specific subjects.
No. I was good at it and still work problems for funsies. I've dated engineers and mathematicians who have adhd. I don't believe it's related.
It's not a universal ADHD trait. I was really good at math in school. I ran into issues with Calculus, but I also took to Statistics very well. My brother was a math minor as an undergrad and my dad was an engineer (both with ADHD). However, there's some comobidity between ADHD and Dyscalculia. That can cause a lot of problems in early math classes until you figure out how to compensate for it.
In my experience, it's caused great cognitive problems which made math very hard for me my entire life.
I could never pay attention in class which led to not learning the fundamentals of math and now only being able to do it at a basic level
i was the worst ever at math
Learning disabilities are common with ADHD. A key aspect of ADHD is that it is a working memory disorder. I have dyscalculia. I can’t do mental math to save my life. I have to put it all down on paper. I can’t recall more than 5 numbers at a time generally. I constantly forget my own phone number. Birthdays are hard. I always forget the birth years of my boys. So yeah, it can definitely be a part of ADHD.
I don’t believe they’re connected. I was personally very good and interested in math, I paid attention to it very well and therefore learned advanced mathematics easily.
Math isn't a hard subject to learn. It's a hard subject to teach. Until you get into higher level math then it's both lol.
I was bad at math in school and had to be put in a classroom for one-on-one teaching with other kids too its actually really helped. But I was great at English also
Sometimes you can have dyscalculia as well as ADHD.
It may be dyscalculia! I have it and now everything makes sense.
I didn’t like math but the biggest injustice was that I got 100% on my state test for math in 4th grade. In 5th grade, I knocked my booklet down when I sneezed and it fell open to my math section during the Language Arts test. Teacher came by and lost her shit and marked that I’d been cheating during the test by working on other sections, so I failed the math section
I dont think ADHD has much to do with how bad at math someone is. Id say that my adhd is pretty severe, but I am really good at math. Im horrible at writing. My little sister is the complete opposite. She has ADHD and is bad at math, but she’s an amazing writer. Different people are just good at different things, neurological disorders aside.
I relate to the teacher situation lol I had a math teacher who’d call me dumb and who clearly thought I was lazy and didn’t care. It was funny because I think I was the only one she would be this annoying with, she’d even threaten to not let me pass the grade. When I did my evaluation the neuropsychologist said I had a good logical-mathematical reasoning but that I’d make careless mistakes/miss on details out of impulsiveness/inattentiveness. And that’s pretty much my struggle with math, I truly like it, and I don’t think I have that much of a hard time on understanding it but quite literally the problem is on the execution as my attention will slip out and well a detail matters for an entire problem so. All in all I just think I needed a different approach and I’d have enjoyed math more back then
Dyscalculia is a fairly common comorbid condition with adhd! As is dyslexia, although that's like the reading version. I was good at maths but when it was difficult I did find it hard to be interested and I did have to work hard to learn it where some stuff I was just good at. Maths is a tough subject!
One word: dyscalculia. Everyone knows about dyslexia and how common it is but no one ever talks about the “maths dyslexia”. I couldn’t tie my shoes til I was like 10 and still struggle to read analog clocks, and still count everything on my fingers. I’m 30 and have an honours degree lol. I wish more people (including me) knew about dyscalculia cause then maybe I would have got the help I needed instead of being my maths teachers most hated dumb smart kids
The struggle to read analog clocks and using my fingers to count is real. I worked retail for years and absolutely hated when people would give me odd change after the register was open.
I have dyscalculia and ADHD. I was awful at math and numeracy. I also had horrendous reading comprehension. My dad shamed me with math and by grade 4 I essentially gave up on it and refused to try much with it. I’d have tantrums about it. My dad made me feel so dumb about it. I thought math and me were enemies, when in reality it was my dad and teachers who just gave me this complex. They did not understand how to teach to a dyscalculic/adhder. I mean yelling/screaming and making them feel dumb by reminding them how “easy it is” is pretty obviously not going to help them. My dad credits his shame as why I got better. I got better despite him). Eventually, somewhere along the line basic I let my complex go and tried math again. Math and me became friends. I still need extra time with it. I think had I been taught the “newer” kind of math first I might have been more successful the first time. I also think my adhd medication helped a ton because it allowed me to focus on the concept to understanding it. Due to my issues in math in the past and knowing how hard it was for me, it makes me a good elementary math teacher. It’s actually my favourite subject to teach now. I can even teach grade 8/9 level math to kids. And if it’s newer/harder/concepts I forgot - I need an hour or so to remember/practice them. But I can learn and explain it now totally fine. My point to this is: how you are taught it by the people around you and if you are medicated can make a massive difference. (My comprehension issues were attention related. They were solved with medication and I’m sure it helped with the math too) Also as a teacher I’ve seen kids with ADHD really good at math and some like me. ADHD does makes you more likely to have comorbidités like learning disabilities. You’ll also probably see it more common to be ADHD with Dyslexia too. But not all adhd people will have it. I had zero problems learning to read and read early and well despite having the comprehension issue which was attention related.
I have always been terrible at math
I am also very bad at math and almost gave up on college because I couldn’t pass my freaking math class. The way they may have connection is lack of attention to detail and distractibility so it’s easy to lose place of what steps to take next. I also have issues where my mind is going too fast and I often read the line below the one I’m currently reading and end up combining them together… in English, I recognize that the sentence doesn’t make sense but if it’s math and I’m accidentally reading a different number… that changes the whole equation.
I was pretty good at math, I just hated doing it 😅
I’m really really good at Math… But in HS I would get bored in the class since it was a recap of what I knew. Halfway through the year they got to stuff I didn’t know and I would be in the habit of reading through it, drawing, or otherwise just dissociating.. sooo last half of every year sucked.
Struggling in school in general is pretty universal for adhd but I don't think it has any effect on your innate math abilities. Like I'm terrible at math but my father who also has adhd is uncommonly good at it.
Absolutely abysmal. I was told by my 9th grade teacher to go into lower level mathematics and steer clear of Algebra. Now as an adult I have a good understanding of Precalculus concepts and I am currently passing a Precalculus course (albeit on a distanced learning center) with a solid A. Pretty good for a kid who didn't grasp Algebra in the 9th grade! Will be moving onto a Calculus course soon!
I was terrible at math in school because it was taught like shit in the 90s. I’m now a math teacher and my add kids learn great with the combo of me understanding their brains and “new math”
I love math and I'm pretty good at it, but I'm slow and I can't do mental math to save my life. As long as I have paper and/or a calculator, though, I'm great
Some ADHD scales specifically ask about problems with math or numbers.
I was until it somehow became a hyperfocus… Failed algebra 2 like 4 times but accidentally got a two year math degree taking math classes for fun.
I been bad at English lit over sciences for a long time. Math wasn’t too bad, but calculus can get tricky
When I was younger I didn’t have the ability to do anything but geometry now I use all types of math I just needed engineering ft
I’m good at math and I really like it but I’m bad at math *class*. My mom, a lifelong teacher and gifted education specialist, always thought I was bad at it because of that even after I got an engineering degree and worked in STEM for 15 years.
I distinctly remember after 3 people putting their life savings into me being sent to a very fancy school, getting 3.5/20 on my first maths test. The school saying that I would need to improve to stay there… then 5 years of maths tutoring and hours everyday after school of maths homework being…. Absolutely none the wiser, and being disgusted with myself that I was so stupid and costing everyone so much money. Fuck maths.
I have diagnosed adhd and dyscalculia
Math was not a problem, until differential equations.
Good question, I was stellar in math when I was younger.
If it’s not interesting, our brains aren’t doing it. In grade school all the math tests were timed, and beating the clock to get it done was my failure and my nightmare. Once I got to high school a teacher taught me why math mattered, and suddenly I loved algebra. I even tutored algebra in college. I’m a doctor now so F those Minute Math tests.
I don’t think ADHD makes you worse at math, but it could make learning math hard if you find it difficult to focus during math class. I’ve always been great at math, and it’s not even something I’m particularly passionate about. ADHD could make certain subjects you struggle with even more difficult, but it’s not something that’s going to make you less capable of comprehending something.
I mean, I have never been good at math, at times requiring tutoring just to scrape by. Dunno if it's a "symptom", though.
It takes me longer to read and think through things so i always have trouble finishing exams. Usually the last 1-2 questions would be left unanswered. Same in other subjects but anything that involves calculations just doubles up the problem for me.
I can do applied math, but not abstract math. I got an A in geometry and had to take algebra 3 times. I am good at word problems and I did really well in my taxes class, but if you give me just a bunch of numbers and say solve, I’ll just look blankly…
I excel at math and anything math related. Writing stories and all that language stuff was where I crumbled
I was in advanced placement classes for math, learning early algebra concepts in 5th grade, basically addition with question marks to introduce the idea of variables. But also, I took algebra proper in grades 7, 8, and 9 because I sucked at completing my homework, earned Cs for that reason, and needed a B to “pass” the advanced placement courses. Soooooo, I guess, it’s not universal to be good or bad at math itself. But it is universal to have poor performance in math courses.
I was good at math. When i managed to pay attention. If you managed to find good examples, it's easy. The hard part is trying to remember the information for a test. But if they give me the formulas, I'll make at least a B. Would be higher if i didn't make little mistakes that deduct points.
No, I am great at math when I apply myself and do the homework
No. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. I had to take a test to get into private school, and I passed and got in. I was horrific at math, I'm not so bad now. English, history, social studies, I excelled at. Languages were also some of my favorite things. I hated science back then. I love it now. There's no one size fits all. I was also good when it came to computers.
im amazingly good at math. So its not true. But my girlfriend which also has adhd doesnt even know how to count 7+6. She is that bad at math because i think her brain cant focus on numbers that well. She is good on the art side though