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Comment by robwormald | Hacker News Reader

"Had I been diagnosed 30 years ago, oh the things I could have done" - truer words have never been spoken. I was diagnosed at 28 and it was like when I got glasses in middle school for the first time. "OHHHH, this is what the world is supposed to look like"

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I first got glasses at 26, so I think I understand what you mean. It was maddening to realize that my issues with math in high school may have been due to my inability to read the textbook quickly enough to succeed.

When were you reading a textbook under time constraints?

Literally every time they read their textbook, it was under time constraints, given there is only a finite amount of time. Being slower than everyone else at any component of school will hurt your performance.

Your reply only makes sense if reading that took the other students 30 minutes was taking jschwartzi 12 hours. It's not normal to be constrained for time (in any way that matters) while reading textbooks. And if ability to read really was a problem, I'd expect it to show up in English, where the great majority of the work consists of reading, much more than in math, where reading the textbook isn't common at all.

Eating my own dogfood and explaining my downvote: expecting a kid or teenager to spend up to 12 hours on homework is crazy.

I said that scintill76's reply would make sense in that case, but that I didn't believe it obtained. A factor-of-3 gap (where 30 minutes of reading for the class average translates into 90 minutes for jschwartzi) is fully within the range of normal variation.

All I know is that I was working as a shipping clerk at the time, and my mis-shipment rate dropped significantly after I got the glasses. When that happened it suddenly occurred to me all the other times where I had to read a ton of numbers and symbols which were densely packed under time constraints and math was the only class like that.

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