counting

i used to think 1+1=11

Anon

I used to think algebra was putting letters in place of numbers, and doing sums with them. So, for instance, A is 1, B is 2 and C is 3 and so on.

Anon

I used to believe that when people would say "pick a number between 1 and 10" you were supposed to pick the number exactly between them. I would of course always pick 5, and be confused when I was wrong.

x

For some reason, I've always imagined certain numbers represented by certain colours:

1-Blue
2-Yellow
3-Green
4-Blue
5-Orange
6-Not sure
7-Pink
8-Red
9-Purple

Maybe it's something to do with the nine planets being colours, although none of them is pink, although people say 7 is a lucky number, because there is something sort of 'pretty' about it, so it makes sense that 7 is the pink and girly number.

Natasha

I thought that Roman Numerals were pronounced like the letters making up the numeral rather than like the number. For one birthday (I think I was about 8 or 9) I got the game Mega Man IV and would keep referring to it as "Mega Man I.V" (pronounced just like the abbreviation for "intravenous") even though my parents corrected me. I'm not sure how long it took for me to say it right.

Emperor Seppuku

I thought the word "divvy" was slang for "divide." So, I would say "8 divvy 2" instead of "8 divided by 2." I'm sure my parents and teachers were confused!

Anon

When I was little I thought you could get arrested if you accidentally skipped a number while counting.

Hailey

When I was 5, I thought a calendar was called a counter

Trisha

I thought 100 was the highest number

Lena

For some reason, whenever I visualized myself being 6 years old, I visualized myself as an actual number 6! I believe I did this until I was around 8.

Anon

You know how some people used to think, you say "blast-off" instead of 0 when counting backwards? Well, I used to say "beep" instead, because I learnt it from our microwave, which always beeped when the food was fully cooked.

AnonymynonA

I used to think that the number 8 was a boy and that 7 was a girl

Anon

Until I was about 3 or 4 years old, I thought that the largest number was 18, and that there could only be 18 of everything. The first time I heard any number past 18 was once when I heard my mom counting to 20 (We were probably having a conversation about numbers), and I asked what the number "nineteennwenty" looked like.

Anon

When I was younger, I believed that times tables in maths were kids sitting at tables staring at clocks!

Anon

When I was in kindergarten, every Wednesday I went to this place where I visited this man who built obstacle courses for me to do. He also liked to spray shaving cream on the mats so we could write words and draw pictures in the shaving cream. One day we decided to write and solve some simple math problems in the shaving cream, and the guy wrote out one problem that really puzzled me. My brain did not certainly record my response, but I wall all like "What the heck? The letter A is not a number!" This was the first variable I ever solved for in my entire life.

10 years later, I have a perfect understanding of algebra!

When I was young I didn't get the whole concept of numbers or value of money. I thought that when you went to a store, you just gave them some money, and they gave you some back. I was very confused one time when my mother didn't get any change back, and acted like this wasn't a problem at all.

Anon