courtesy of 1000 Playthinks
🙂
Found this the other night when I was tidying, and decided I’d inflict it on Big. Expected her to wail and moan and wriggle, instead she practically ripped it out of my hand and we started working through the puzzles difficulty level 1. We got to one about pythagoras, and we ended up with the cuisenaire rods out, testing out the theories. Now all I have to do is work out the point…
pythagoras was one of the first ways I realised how odd I can be. At 12 I started at a private all girl’s school, on an assisted place. Which meant that I’d passed a far more rigid set of entrance interviews and tests than the ppl who were paying to be there, and also that the headmistress took a personal interest in me (and the rest of my scheme cohorts). She took us for maths, geometry to be precise, one lesson a week (she did it for every girl starting the school, and she remembered all of our names). I can remember her asking who knew about pythagoras and shooting my hand up, expecting everyone else to know too, and being amazed to discover that I was the only one who had heard that “the squaw on the hippopotamus is exactly equal to the sum of the squaws on the other two hides”. No, I don’t know why I knew either, but I did. Maybe it was somewhere in one of those fletcher maths books we did at primary school, or maybe one of the offbeat teachers told me about it sometime, in between lending me his own Alan Garner books, or encouraging me to learn entire scripts so that I could prompt for school performances of Willie Wonka or Tom Sawyer without the script in my hand.
I was an odd child, wasn’t I?
Most of the time I think Big isn’t so odd. Then she gets all lit up over some little puzzle, or managing to complete Mastermind against Tim in four rounds (she was a bit chuffed with that) and she sets me off thinking again.
Wonder what Small is saving up for us. G’night.
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