Is it just me, or is this totally not funny? I mean dyscalculia is a very real condition that lots of people suffer from. In fact, to some degree I think we all suffer from it. More on that in a while.
How did this get to be a thing? Didn't we used to send cutesy things round the Internet like skateboarding cats and hamsters playing piano?
Here's what I think: the little boy (and he can only be 10 or 11 at most) adds up '9 plus 10' and comes up with 21. I reckon he's adding two tens together and then trying to take away the extra 1. However, rather than taking it away, he's adding it by mistake. Well this is far from 'stoopid'. It's a very neat method, just backwards in its execution. He's visualising and chunking and processing several steps all at once, and he's doing it quickly.
And that thought leads us back to universal dyscalculia. Imagine 5 coins arranged on a desk. Now try to imagine 13. Come on! It's easy! No don't count them, just imagine them! Right, now 27, now 76 and 164! If you're like me, it'll be tough to visualise numbers over about 9 or 10 without arranging them or counting them. How do you feel about that? Stupid? Well you shouldn't. It's just dyscalculia, scaled out into a less frequently occurring problem.
Here's another. Multiply out these brackets without writing it down:
(a+b)(b+c)(a+c) = ?
The point is that sometimes it's very difficult for us to hold multiple things in our heads, to keep track of the numbers as we add, subtract and multiply them. And I bet all of us have felt 'stoopid' in a maths class when everyone else just 'got it' and we were left red-faced with tears. For that poor young man, the problem was relatively difficult but it is most definitely not his fault. And now, over 3 million people have seen an adult humiliate him for comic effect, ironically proving that it's us, all of us who share and cackle at this stuff, who need educating. Shame on us.
Things have come a long way since the sneezing panda.
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