TPP 119: Adrianne Meldrum on Dealing with Math Struggles Faced by Differently Wired Kids
episode
Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
48 min
2 speakers
7 chapters
transcribed 1 day ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What challenges do differently‑wired kids face with math in middle school?
They get this notion of perfection starting around third grade with those timed math tests that they believe, oh This is what a good math student does. They do it quickly and perfectly. And that is the furthest thing from the truth. We're searching to make students great problem solvers, uh, the ability to estimate when they're correct and to persevere through something when it's hard. And those are skills I think all of us could agree on a student needs.
Welcome to Tilt Parenting, a podcast featuring interviews and conversations aimed at inspiring, informing, and supporting parents raising differently wired kids. I'm your host, Debbie Rieber, and today, as we're getting into that back to school time, we are going to be talking about one subject that can be challenging for many kids, but can be particularly tricky for a lot of differently wired kids. Yes, that's right, I am talking about math. If your child struggles in any way with math, whether with perfectionism or making sloppy mistakes, struggling to memorize math facts, getting stressed out by timed math exercises, you will definitely get a lot out of this episode. To break it all down for us, I brought onto the show Adrian Meldrum, founder of Math for Middles, a virtual tutoring business whose coaches have training in multi-sensory math techniques and special training.
That helps them work confidently with middle school math students who have diagnosed and undiagnosed learning differences. Adrienne has experience working with students who struggle with executive functioning, ADHD, dyslexia, poor working memory, and autism. And in our conversation, she'll explain why certain math concepts can be challenging for these kids and share strategies for where to start to support the kind of learner our child is. Before I get to the episode, I want to say thank you to those of you who are supporting the podcast through Patreon. Your support's helping me pay my editor, who takes these recorded conversations and intros and outros, cleans them up, edits them, tags them, and uploads them to Apple Podcasts.
This literally saves me hours of time each week, and it allows me to focus on all the other pieces of keeping Tilt going and supporting this community. So if you get a lot of value out of this podcast, please consider joining my Patreon campaign where you can register to back the show by making a small monthly contribution. Literally less than the cost of a latte at Starbucks each month can help a lot. To sign up, go to patreon.com slash tiltparenting. Thanks so much for considering and now here is my conversation with Adrian. Hey Adrienne, welcome to the podcast. Hey Debbie, it's good to be here. I'm looking forward to this conversation. It's kind of a different topic for us, but when we were emailing back and forth, I was like, this is actually super practical and I hope will be of great benefit to the listeners.
So thank you for coming on to talk with us about this today. Absolutely. I'm really excited to share what I know about it. All right. So before we get into the meaty meat of the conversation, just give us a little background about who you are, the work that you do in the world, and you know, my favorite question, your personal why for doing that work.
Oh, great. Yes. So I'm Adrienne Mildrum. I'm the owner of Math for Middles, as in Middle Schoolers. And we focus on providing multi-sensory math for differently wired children, which I love that phrase, Debbie. I'm gonna use it the rest of my life. I think it's amazing. And we've been doing this work uh all online since about 2016. But before that I was a math tutor privately since about 2006. And over that time period, I was always really driven to find out why. Why doesn't the student understand? And I was always looking for different methods and different ways to serve these these middle schoolers. And uh it was then that I stumbled upon multi-sensory. Learning through asdec.org. There's there's other services out there that provide training like making math real.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What challenges do differently‑wired kids face with math in middle school?
0:00–9:18
2
Why do many students fall behind by sixth grade and how can early intervention help?
9:18–18:57
3
What is multisensory math and how does the concrete‑representational‑abstract (CRA) model work?
18:57–26:43
4
Can you walk through a concrete example (e.g., 2 × 5) using manipulatives, area models, and abstract notation?
26:43–31:56
5
What IEP or 504 accommodations (e.g., unlimited time, graphic organizers, reduced‑problem pages) are most effective for math‑related anxiety?
31:56–38:35
6
How can parents reduce homework overwhelm and create a calm, focused study environment?
38:35–44:05
7
What emotional‑regulation strategies (e.g., neutral tone, pacing, celebrating effort) support math learning for anxious or autistic learners?
44:05–48:03
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
TPP 266a: A Conversation with Poet and Advocate LeDerick Horne
TPP 522: A Whole Child Approach to ADHD with Phil Boucher, M.D.
TPP 091a: A Conversation With Steve Silberman About His Book “Neurotribes”
TPP 521: A Conversation with Dr. Peter Gray About Restoring Childhood
TPP 253a: Advocate and Author Jonathan Mooney on Why Normal Sucks
TPP 520: Dr. Özgür Bolat on Why Rewards Backfire and the Real Science of Motivating Kids