A Different Way to LOOK at Math

(The OT Access Lens Series – Math Edition | Blog 1: The Shift)

What’s surprised me most lately are not just what I’m seeing in schools… but how differently I’m starting to understand math itself.

As an Occupational Therapist, I’ve always worked through a visual lens—reading, handwriting, spacing, organization, and how students interact with what they see on a page.

But if I’m honest, math was something I used to view more narrowly. As I said in my previous blog, I've struggled with math myself and it was not something I typically would look at with my students. Mostly alignment. Number formation. Written output. Attention. Organization.

That perspective has shifted.

Part of that shift has come from my own life at home. As a bonus parent, I’ve found myself looking at math struggles through a very different lens lately. In my own household, I’ve been watching how a bright child can understand math concepts, yet still experience real strain when visualization and spatial processing don’t come easily.

And it has made something very clear:

Math is not just numerical. It is deeply visual.

Even everyday math tasks rely heavily on visual perception and spatial processing that most people never associate with “math difficulty.”

Things like:

• keeping numbers organized on a page

• recognizing patterns and relationships

• understanding shapes, diagrams, and spatial concepts• visualizing what a problem is asking

• remembering information while working through multiple steps

• organizing mathematical information so it makes sense visually

• making sense of graphs, charts, number lines, and spatial relationships

And once you start seeing this, you can’t unsee it in students either.

Because suddenly, math struggles don’t look like effort problems anymore.

They look like access problems.

A student can be bright and still struggle if the visual foundation for learning is inefficient. And that realization changes everything about the way I think about math performance, intervention, and even what is defined as a “math problem” in schools.

This is the beginning of a larger conversation I didn’t expect to be having...

But now that I see it, I can’t stop seeing it.

Next up: The Hidden Visual Perception Skills Behind Math Success