TINDERBOX

“I used to love playing with my rods and pattern blocks, but” – Alex heaved a dramatic sigh – “not anymore.”

“Oh yeah? Why do you think that is?”

“Well, sometimes when children get older they just don’t like the same things they used to like,” my worldly-wise four-year-old explained.

She went on to clarify, a little later, that she still likes math but only when she can do it in her head. She told me that she lies in bed at night doing silent math. (There was an interesting side discussion here about the special mouth inside her head that can talk in a way that no one hears.) “Like, I do 2+2=4, 4+4=8, 8+8=16.”

I told her that it was cool that she could do math in her head, but that we might want to get the rods out sometime to learn new math that she doesn’t already know. It turns out that she was not really aware that there might be math she didn’t know. She demanded to know what it was. I mentioned fractions, multiplication, division, and “more stuff with negative numbers.” Hmm, she said.

I asked her a few simple addition problems that start with larger numbers, like 70+5 and 100+10. She was pretty gleeful about getting them right. Then I tried 33+1 and 22+2. I think of those as being trickier because you’re not just mashing two number names together the way you are with seventy plus five is seventy-five. She got them both right, though, so maybe she really is clear on the concept.

This was all happening in the car on the way to nursery school. We were pulling up in front of the school and I wanted to let her finish with a bang, so I asked her “How much is a hundred million plus one million?”

“A hundred and one million,” Alex said, grinning from ear to ear.

“Yeah,” I said. “How awesome is that?”