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.
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.
ReplyDeleteWatterson 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.