Wrong Answers... with a Twist

A couple of years back, when my (then) 3-4 year old daughter was learning to count, she used to go “…twenty eight, twenty nine, twenty ten”. It left me with mixed feelings: an ‘F’ for correctness, an ‘A+’ for logical thinking.

Now, at age 6, another such incident. She was being taught the names of the various shapes (rectangles, circles, cubes and the like). Then, the text book called for identification for the shapes on this figure:
These were her answers:

So she got #4 and #5 wrong. The boring possibility is that she hadn’t internalized the shapes yet. But I think hope that she was trying to factor in the curved bottoms of #4 and #5, in which they can’t really be called triangles. The right answer would then be cone, er, kone.

Regardless of what really happened with #4 and #5, I loved the answer she gave for #8:
It’s obvious why she called #8 a “face” instead of a “circle”. The right answer is often context sensitive, as we all learn eventually.

I never thought one could even enjoy the mistakes a kid makes…

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarNovember 22, 2017 at 10:03 AM

    This blog shows in the one side the dad Vijay's quality - the ability to present painstakingly, making the graphic focused and ensuring its place. Without it, there would be "no show"! That apart, Aditi has done the whole trick - unbelievable!

    Aditi, at one go, has highlighted without any intention to do so, how adults do our thinking within constraints, while the child (like Michelangelo did what he did in art in utter freedom) thinks in freedom! :-) On every count she has scored above the adults, in so far as the ability to openness goes.

    An adult would present a face imagining it is a catchy way to deal with figure learning, but when the child catches the face, the adult ticks it wrong - how wrong the adult can be! When the mathematician declares that a cone, when seen in 2D form, is a triangle it is correct - if Aditi says so, ticked wrong - how much more wrong the average adult can be! And then, Aditi capped it all telling what we all know - English spelling can be pretty sylli - sorry 'silly'! Again it is not the English language is ticked wrong but the child who understands how to spell!

    One of the lovely blogs, I enjoyed, thanks to Aditi and dad.

    By the way, this immortal line comes to my mind now: "Child is the father of man". Wordsworth must have had the mind of a child when he wrote it - no adult could have pulled it off, I am inclined to believe.

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