Severely Tested

Ronnie's Strange Math Test
Originally uploaded by rae.

This morning, even before coffee, while Evan was still in bed, the children started testing me.

Sabrina was first.

“Mom, okay.” She held up a sheet of paper, the writing of which only she could see. “What number?”

Mind-reading abilities not withstanding, I admitted I needed more information.

“Okay. Mom, what number comes before 4?”

And so it went, until…: “What’s the first number?”

“One.”

“Okay. Right. What’s the biggest number?”

“There isn’t one.”

A pause for consideration. “Okay…” Then: “What number has a one and a one and a zero?”

“One hundred and ten. But that’s not the biggest number.”

“Right.” She again considered the digit she had written. “One hundred and ten. Okay.”

And so it went.

Then Ellie started to test me. She was sitting on my lap breaking a brown crayon into small pieces.

“Which crayon? Brown or orange?”

“Brown.”

“Nooooo!”

Then Jack designed a math quiz for me. I did all the problems. Bruce came down from bed just in time to correct it.

“You got one wrong.”

“What?!”

“The answer is –894, not 906.”

“Well, that depends on which direction you read the problem. Jack told me to read it from top to bottom and towards the left.”

“Aha. I was reading it from right to left and bottom to top.”

How you look at a problem makes all the difference in how you solve it.

Bruce recalculated my score. “You got them all right.”

What a relief. Another series of tests successfully surmounted.

Poor Bruce, now it is his turn to be severely tested.