"I'm Cool, You're Not!"

A week or two ago Jason asked, "What is 10 minus 100?"

"Minus 90," I said.

"No, it's zero," he said. "If you have 10 and you take away 100, then you take away all 10 and you have zero. Ha Ha! I'm cool, you're not!"

He is always asking about numbers and seems to be pretty good at math. A few weeks ago he surprised me by asking for my dad's age and then my age and almost immediately working out the difference (68 - 41 = 27). I was pretty impressed because that is pretty good for a 6 year old.

Comments

Barbara said…
It's time for a discussion of infinity. My son was fascinated by that concept at a very early age.
CG said…
I think you should discuss, the minus end of things... However as most scientific comunity work purely on positive, you might save a lot of time and effort trying to understand it :) He's certainly clever!
CG said…
Also tell him about multiplications with 0 that is really cool stuff!
Richard said…
barbara: he's known about infinity for years now. And of course, he imagines double infinity and triple infinity, even infinity-infinity.

carra: For now he can play with the Natural numbers. Eventually it will dawn on him that there are negative numbers. He already knows that zero times anything is 0 One day, I will have to sit him down and explain that zero times infinity is not defined.
tin-tin said…
hahaha. he's cool. you're not. hahaha ;p
He's a smart kid. I wasn't good at math ever including today, but I do remember asking my mom her age and when she didn't tell me, I asked how old she was when she had me, and then added my age, (7) That was pretty surprising for a slow kid!
Richard said…
tin-tin: :P

MOI: unless there is a genuine mental impediment, I don't believe people are slow. I accept that different people like different things and they have different strengths and are pretty much equally capable of learning. Sometimes, we just write them off instead of working with them. I know a lot of patience and work has gone into getting Jason to read (in French - never mind English or Spanish for the moment). He is very, very fidgety, his limbs are constantly moving. However, sitting down with him and getting him to read (along with the bribery of Yu-Gi-Oh cards), he has improved greatly.

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