General Advice + Abbreviations for curriculum are confusing me?

I’m just starting out with CM (which I figured out was Charlotte Mason) 🙂

I homeschooled after years in public school but math/science have always been my biggest struggle. I kind of just memorized things to pass grades. I did pretty well in all my other subjects, so my teachers never really thought I had a problem. For me though, at least, memorization doesn’t = learning and understanding.

Considering I want to go into a scientific field though, I need to have a very good grasp of math and science, including optional, higher level subjects. I’ll be 20 this summer and wanted to fill some gaps.

I’ve moved a LOT, so even when I started homeschooling, my routine was always disrupted just when I “Settled in”, and we had to move again. Besides that, I dealt with some very serious health issues throughout the last 10 years, so compared to that, school was always second in my mind (even though I LOVE to learn). I still have some of the same issues, but things seem more regulated now.

I’m basically just wanting to start over with math, so I’m even looking at elementary math.

I have tried some of the other learning programs out there, workbooks etc. but they were either too boring so that I didn’t learn anything from them, or clearly designed for children. Which of course they would be. I don’t care about using a program that normally teaches kids, but I mean really young children, to the point that while it might have entertained me when I was really young, the little cartoons and explanations are so distracting.

On the flip side, I’ve tried learning from ‘distraction free’ black and white, plain workbooks, textbooks etc… that didn’t do much for me either. I was bored out of my mind.

The Charlotte Mason method seems like a really great option for me to try using to ‘re educate’ myself.

I’d really love some advice, if anyone has any.

If it helps, I have ADHD. I have some trouble concentrating, so things have to be interesting for me to learn. I’m the kind of person who has to know the “why” and “how” and basically “everything” about a subject to really understand it.

I also have high functioning autism (Asperger syndrome). Most people who I tell say that I don’t seem like I have it (e.g. socially), which is pretty common in girls with it I guess, but mentally I have a lot of the same problems; a lot of autistics also have other learning disabilities, like ADHD, and I also have dyscalculia and dyslexia. My dyslexia, I’ve pretty well learned to cope with, but I haven’t really ever found a way around dyscalculia.

The only thing I can think of is to find some really good, unconventional math curriculum and study it and become really good at math anyways.

Also, I’ve never been diagnosed with it or anything, but I “present” like maybe I have some audio/visual processing disorders, since I usually have to focus really hard on what I’m hearing or read something several times before it sinks in.

I know that not everyone here is a doctor, but I appreciate any advice I get. Over the years I’ve been told to do XYZ by various doctors, and even though they meant well, most of their advice didn’t help me.

Usually the best advice/encouragement I got was from other people who had to deal with the same things I did, or parents who had to help their other kids overcome these issues and find the best learning strategies with them.

I was going through this website trying to see which math and science curriculum would be best suited for me but everyone seems to use abbreviations when referring to them; since I’m completely new to Charlotte Mason I don’t know any of these mean.

Could someone maybe make a list of what things like ‘CLE’ and ‘AO’ and so on refer to, so that I could look at these?