Primary Motor: This problem interferes with the speed, strength and control of muscle movements on one side of the body or the other. This results in some degree of awkwardness of body movement and some degree of less articulated movement of the affected side of the body.
Supplementary Motor: A problem in this area impairs a person from carrying out internal sequential mental operations such as doing mathematics inside his head.
The person can be so impaired that simple counting processes break down.
The person has difficulty calculating change.
If this dysfunction is at a moderate level of severity it means that the person is unable to sufficiently hold numbers inside his head to stably learn the addition and multiplication tables. The person cannot make progress in mathematics beyond a grade 4 level. The person resorts to finger or stick counting when solving math questions.
If the problem is less severe the person may be able to eventually learn his math tables but since he cannot do even relatively simple mental operations he cannot carry out the more difficult aspects of dealing with fractions at a grade 4 to 6 level.
At a mild level a grade 10 student was not able to factor algebraically due to the difficulty of not being able to imagine all the possible combinations of factors that could be multiplied together to lead to the algebraic trinomial he was trying to factor.
Anyone interested in a career involving mathematics requires the supplementary motor capacity for mental operations at an above average level to succeed.
'Arrrowsmith Program's Description of Learning Dysfucitons'
Reprinted with permission from www.arrowsmithschool.org
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