language: counting

When I was in kindergarten, every Wednesday I went to this place where I visited this man who built obstacle courses for me to do. He also liked to spray shaving cream on the mats so we could write words and draw pictures in the shaving cream. One day we decided to write and solve some simple math problems in the shaving cream, and the guy wrote out one problem that really puzzled me. My brain did not certainly record my response, but I wall all like "What the heck? The letter A is not a number!" This was the first variable I ever solved for in my entire life.

When I was young I didn't get the whole concept of numbers or value of money. I thought that when you went to a store, you just gave them some money, and they gave you some back. I was very confused one time when my mother didn't get any change back, and acted like this wasn't a problem at all.

I Thought i was pretty smart as a young kid and liked to show off to my parents. On one roadtrip i wanted to show my parents i could count to a million, so i started counting and i knew up to 100 or so, but i remember my parents (maybe sick of my squeaky-voiced counting and "are you listening to me? Muuuum? Daaaad?") distracted me with a book i could write all the numbers instead

When I was a kid I thought there was a biggest number. I asked my mom and dadd what was the biggest number but they said there was no biggest number since you could always just add another zero. They tried to explain this to me multiple times but I just couldn't wrap my mind around it!

i used to think that my adopted mom, who even at the time was quite old, was actually 10 years old. i thought this because i could only count up to ten at the time, so i thought 10 must be pretty old. i also thought that i would become a grown up when i became 10.

Before I went to Kindergarten and was learning to count, I always left out the number 8: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10. And my mum and dad would always say (so they would tell me, as I don't remember this): "What ever happened to poor old 8?" And I apparently would have no idea. And strange enough, 8 is my favorite number today!

I used to believe that a hundred and one hundred were different numbers. When I was fascinated with counting that high, I always did a hundred first, then continued to count to one hundred.

When I was very young I was convinced that there was a biggest number. And I was continually annoyed that no one would tell me what the biggest number was. I asked my mom all the time but she would never give me an answer. It seemed to me that if there was a smallest number (0) then there must be a biggest number too. I was extremely annoyed by this until I was 6 or 7!

When I was about 5 or 6 years old, I thought, I could count up to 1 million. I counted correctly to 100, but then 101, 102, 103,.....108, 109, 1000, 1001, 1002, 1003, ....1008, 1009, 1 000 000.
I actually thought, this was the right way.

I was very proud on this ability and always wondered, why I didn't get very much respect for this by grown-ups.

I believed as a kid that there were "Irish numerals" just like there were Roman numerals. And that the letters for the Irish numerals were S, H, N, and T. (instead of Roman numerals I, V, X, and L - those were the only ones I knew at the time - I learned C, D, and M later)

I used to believe that the abbreviation for pounds was pronounced "labs", and that the abbreviation for ounces was pronounced "Oz" (like the Wizard of Oz)

I used to think that if you wanted to count from 100 to 200, you counted "100, 101, 102..." and so on, until you got to 109. Then it was 200. That belief only lasted about a day or two.

when i was little i somehow got the idea 20 was the highest number. i made my mom count to twenty for my dad and then proclaimed "and that that's the last number!" i didn't understand why my parents laughed

There was a raging argument in my second or third grade class about whether infinity or a googol is the biggest number, and whether infinity exists at all. First someone had to tell me about infinity, but I was "pro-infinity" till the end.

When I was in third grade, I had lots of Playmobil toys (dolls and all the furniture and stuff for the world they live in) and one thing was a box that said No. 28 (number 28). I thought that said "No 28" as in 28 had been removed from the counting sequence. My image of 28 for some reason was this really nice teacher who taught all the lower numbers until she spontaneously exploded! Poor 28! To this day 28 is my favorite number (followed by 48 and 8, but I have no explanation for these).

My mom and dad told me that numbers go up to infinity when i was 5 so when i was 12 after i got to the 1000's i'd go infanty the end and my classmates would say what about one million and i'd say who would make something as stupid as that up retard numbers only go up to infanty and my teacher says no they don't stop they go on to infinity and i would say that's what i said and he didn't believe me she said infanty isn't the end of the alphabet and i would say abviously i need to teach the class