When I was little I didn't really understand how numbers worked, I knew that you could carry on counting forever so naturally I assumed that the number system was cyclic, you obviously couldn't have that many different numbers.
When counting in 10s in my number system you went '10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 20, 30, 40.... ad infinitum
obviously with numbers less than 20 you knew whether they were bigger or smaller than each other, cos you only used them once, but when asked as a child 'is 30 bigger or smaller than 20' I replied 'id depends on which 20'
I'm quite good at maths now..
A childhood belief about counting
others believed things like this
- I used to believe that numbers had gender, that the odd numbers were boys and even numbers were girls. — Evelyn
- When I was little I thought you could get arrested if you accidentally skipped a number while counting.— Hailey
- I used to believe that after the number "ten" came the numbers "tendy-one, tendy-two..." etc.Anon
- Numbers went up to 100 then restarted at zero.Anon
- The highest of all numbers was "a finnety."— Becky
- i used to belive that 1 to 10 were the only numbers and all others were made up.....— Eric