Imaginary Numbers

Amaya is probably the only person who truly considers positive integers to be as abstract as metaphors.

When she started Kindergarten last year she couldn’t count to ten. When she finished Kindergarten she could sometimes count to twenty. Now half way through the second time around she can count to 39, and then she says “twenty”.

I’ve tried to explain how this works to her. Four comes after three, and therefore, forty. If I help her get past 39, she gets stuck at 49 (back to twenty) and so on.

Today we were counting and she said, “I don’t think anyone can count to 100.”

I said, “Lots of people can count to 100. I can count to 100.”

“WHAT?! I thought it was almost impossible!”

I said, “Once you learn how to count it’s like a pattern, and you can count as high as you want.”

“But no one can count to a million. It’s a sploder!”

“A ‘sploder’? What’s a ‘sploder’?”

“It’s like 33,000. Or a really long car ride.”

Only Amaya can create a simile about a number with an imaginary word compared to a number, and it still makes some kind of strange sense.