Pedagogical work
Textruta: Three types of help: Reducing the effects of the pupil’s difficulties Helping the pupil compensate for the difficulties Reducing the difficulties themselves By discussing the potential mathematics-related difficulties as early as possible, even before the child enters school, one may reduce the risk of secondary effects such as the child developing a negative self-image or losing interest in mathematics altogether. In the long run, a lack of interest in math can transfer to other school subjects as well. While helping a pupil better understand his/her difficulties in math, one can also focus on the child’s areas of strength. One should begin discussing the child’s difficulties as well as the opportunities for helping the child with the parents as early as possible. True enough, if one simply waits, the child may overcome its difficulties on its own. However, waiting may lead to the difficulties the child had from the start creating emotional difficulties that result in the child finally refusing to make any serious efforts with math at all. This is rather frequent among pupils who start displaying such difficulties around the time they enter puberty. A reduction of the difficulties themselves can best be achieved by individual teaching sessions. This approach is most effective at dealing with the problems of children characterized by having some rather specific form of mathematical difficulties. One should be careful not to overestimate the value of exercising the child in skills he/she has failed to automatize, particularly since such training can lead to a loss of interest in math and thus fail to have a positive effect. Sometimes it is best to circumvent math training as such and provide the child with intellectual stimulation at a higher level. If one emphasizes too one-sidedly those abilities that are not automatized such as those pertaining to the span of numbers up to 20, there is a risk of neglecting matters of problem solving and reflection, which are important elements in math. The traditional view of mathematical learning is that one needs to have perfected skills at the one level before one can advance to the next. This is often far from correct. Even if a child is uncertain about the span of numbers of up to 10, one can and indeed should go on to present the child with numbers that are larger than 10, one reason for this being that different cognitive functions and thought processes are involved in dealing with numbers that are greater than 10. If one does decide that the child should practice skills he/she has not yet automatized, it is probably best to do this for only short periods each time. Many of these pupils have difficulties with planning and solving mathematical problems on their own. This is particularly obvious in tasks involving a text in which a variety of different numbers are cited, where they may get lost in the text and thus fail to discover how the task can be solved. The letters may be obvious but the underlying mathematical meaning is not. Although such problems can have the appearance of being problems with reading, they often reflect instead difficulties in grasping the essence of a problem and in planning. Thus, it is often skills of the latter two sorts that should be practiced by helping the child to more readily understand the basic meaning of a text and to, on a step-by-step basis, reach a solution. Such an approach can also be successful when working with pupils who have difficulties understanding time relations or basic planning. Working with a pupil on an individual basis is always the best approach. Textruta: Facts Mathematical exercises of the wrong sort could make the situation for a child with dyscalculia worse

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