[rl] I'm starting to suspect one of my adult tutoring students has a learning disability and for all my expertise with children, I have no idea at all how to approach it in an adult

well the problem is...what resources even are there for adults anyway?

also true

I guess it's more that I'm trying and failing to understand how to help her when she sometimes comes at me with things that make absolutely no sense to me :|a

not to mention, if this adult made it through traditional schooling, it's not as much of an issue

well, she technically did, but whatever school she went to did nooooot adequately prepare her, and now she's trying to study for a professional license which is why she hired me to tutor her in math

does she completely not understand the subject or

I don't know if it's dyscalculia or what but like... she's a perfectly intelligent person, she's doing well in all other areas, but she has the most baffling error patterns when she has patterns at all -- more often she'll just sort of glitch out and do something that makes no sense

do you have an example?

like-- for example, we've gotten up to linear equations, and 75% of the time if I give her a linear equation in a non-standard form and ask her to put it in a particular form, she can. But then the other 20% of the time, she'll totally ignore the negatives/positives, and then the other 5% of the time she'll subtract instead of multiplying or divide instead

of, like, adding. Or she'll answer half in fractions and half in decimals.

Or, the thing that prompted this plurk, she literally turned in a problem half-finished and when I was like, "where's the other half?" she didn't seem to have any idea what I was talking about, even though it was exactly the same as a problem we did earlier

she's a very careful, thoughtful person, so it's totally out of character for her -- it's like it literally slips through her fingers at random moments

that sounds like ADHD tbh

so belatedly I went over some stuff with her today and I think ADHD was a good guess but the real culprit is ADHD's annoying cousin, anxiety

which I know she has

I've read about anxiety mimicking ADHD in some cases but have only ever encountered the opposite -- ADHD with anxiety features

she has zero signs of ADHD in any other aspect of her life though

anxiety can absolutely do it too