Maths with Calvin

When I ran out of books to read to my 6 year old, I took out Calvin and Hobbes with the idea of reading her a few strips that night and find something she’d like later on. But boy, is she hooked! So what’s appealing to her? The naughtiness, obviously. Calvin’s imagination is highly relatable. And as a girl with a stuffed toy, she finds the idea of a stuffed boy that comes to life as simply awesome. But what surprised me was her appreciation of Bill Watterson’s drawings, especially when he draws Calvin’s expressions. I guess the ability to appreciate drawings is a side-effect of the art work that she does as part of her yoga classes near home.

At school, she’s been learning addition. So I read her this strip:


Never one to let go off a chance to show off, she added 3 + 8 on her fingers. Then with an even-I-know-the-answer smugness declared that the correct answer was “11”. The icing on the cake though was when she added, “Obviously, the answer has to be greater than 8 (since 8 is one of the numbers being added). How can the answer be 6?”

The next strip in the series was this one:

She reacted with the same shock as Calvin when she heard the term “imaginary numbers”! She was then greatly amused by the examples that Hobbes quoted (“eleventeen” and “thirty-twelve”). Ah, she said those aren’t real numbers, that’s why they are imaginary. And to think, just a few years back, when she was still learning to count, she used to go “twenty seven, twenty eight, twenty nine, twenty ten”! How quickly perspectives change…

Did Bill Watterson have a 6 year old when he drew these strips? Because, boy, he’s nailed the thought process of a kid that age perfectly.

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarOctober 23, 2017 at 3:09 PM

    Very good. For one thing the Calvin comics are fantastic. To add a topping, you have included your own six-yea old's perspective. Lovely indeed.

    Watterson did not require a six yer old kid to be his consultant while creating all the wild Calvins - Like Shakespeare living out the characters he presents so did Watterson. He had the same uncanny ability to get into Calvin's very nature in himself. That is what distinguishes literature from ordinary writing.

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