(848) Myelination

Just the other day I was chatting with my friend. She mentioned that her friend Stacy was having problems with her adopted daughter, Crystal. Crystal went into Grade 1 at the beginning of this year. Until now, she failed to grasp the idea of addition. For failing to add 2 and 3 together, this is the second case of supposed normal girls I have come across.  My cousin's youngest daughter had this problem. Her teacher was at wit's end. Her mum screamed at her own inability to make things clear. In the end, it took the father's patient coaching over a three-day weekend to get her across the hurdle.

Years later, I asked the father how did he learn to do special education. He said he did not have any such difficulty himself, but he had to help all his brothers and sisters. Sure enough, he was the only graduate in his own family. I suppose if dyslexia run in that family, his daughter was suffering from discalculia.

I have no problem with calculations. But I did have some difficulties teaching my eldest son the time tables. He can recite it alright at age 10. But twist the problem a little and he got waylaid, couldn't apply either multiplication or division to solve the problem. For Grade 1 and 2, he was doing well. But when the times table was slowly introduced, he did not understand the principles behind it at all. Yet for standard problems, he could solve them. So he was not doing badly in terms of marks. I was highly stressed those few years, diligent as I was in drilling, he was not making any progress. Then, interestingly, it happened exactly as my husband predicted. Somewhere towards the end of Grade 5, over one weekend he leaped. On Friday night I was still shaking my head over his failure to spot the tricky problems. Surprisingly on Monday night he aced and had no more problems with all types of questions to do with multiplication and division from that point on. I was shocked!

 Years later, I read that this happened when the nerve bundles in the child's nervous systems become fully myelinated. Imagine individual nerve as electrical wire, each should be totally insulated. In the case of wire, we need rubber or plastic insulation. Nerves, on the other hand, are insulated by fatty acids or such like organic compounds. According to the experts, prior to perfect insulation, electrical signals crossed wire. Hence, all my hard work drilling was going no where. Yet when he was ready, the nerves individually insulated, he could not only understand, but he could solve all kinds of problems on his own. I did not improve in my teaching at all, but he had the needed apparatus and hence could hold his own.

Interestingly, even though he was not particularly gifted in mathematics (in his case, he is able to pick up phrases rather easily in any foreign countries), he did not require any more coaching in maths from that point onward. Once he got past pre-u mathematics, he excelled in linguistics.