Your 4 year old had the exact opposite response to me at 4!
So story time. I learned to draw before I learned about the numbers, my current besties. Shout out to the integers! The best ring!!
My mom tried to teach me about the numbers using her fingers and counting them and I was so confused. Are we naming fingers? Is this positions? These are connected! Continuous! If she’d used coins or beans, I might not be writing this. But as it stands, what is happening?!?
A day or two later I was drawing with chalk outside, a triangle, one of the very best shapes in the entire universe. My mom saw another opportunity to get me to learn about numbers!
The thing is she didn’t really want me to become a mathematician. Although math can be useful and it seems impressive, it can also be hella boring. She was actually hoping for a humanities kid. Or maybe a naturalist. Basically anything besides what I became. I was supposed to be like Oliver Sacks, like good at everything. She wanted someone to live vicariously through, not a number loving freak. That was not her dream at all.
She saw my triangle, drawn in a loud orange. And proceeded to count the vertices. I was like oh no, not this again. We’re naming corners, oh no!!!!
But unlike before she could erase the edges and I finally saw it! Not only did I see it, but something in my brain exploded.
And thus began all of my mathematics synesthesia.
Math looks like pictures to me. It continues to look like pictures to me. If it has a picture already, like a lot of geometry, that’s great. Then my brain will just animate it. Makes it easy.
If it doesn’t, my brain invents a picture (which probably evolves) and then animates it. There is also usually a soundtrack and feelings, physical feelings, involved. Yes, I am basically almost always on the cusp of overstimulation. Yes, this does definitely have to do with the seizures.
She proceeded to point out the numbers of vertices of the square, the pentagram, etc. And then how all of these can be transcribed in the circle (the real shape goat). Finally, she pointed out how a circle is the union of an infinite number of points equidistant from its center, the origin.
You heard that right. 4 years old and I had met infinity and accepted that man into my heart and my little brain had animated that man. And some adults are still afraid? Grow up!!!
Anyway as suggested above, this backfired in a hilarious way for my mom because I immediately became totally obsessed with numbers. I appropriated a calculator and thus my dad gave it to me. This incredible machine was full of number facts but I couldn’t really understand how it worked. I quickly realized adults understood it better. (Imagine me, 4 years old, trying to articulate poorly formed calculator questions with a pronounced speech impediment to an adult I just met). My mother was so annoyed about this. It’s hard to even convey her level of aggravation about it and the denial she lived with about it.
The kid that was supposed to be the one she could live vicariously through was taking after her annoying husband. Tragic. Real fucking tragic. Anyway now I draw pictures of math for living sometimes. Who could’ve seen it coming?
