counting

It always confused me when my mom would ask someone what "percent" certain they were, and they would answer 80% or 90%. I thought, if you're certain, you're certain, and these people all must have an agreed upon number that would mean they are certain. Finally, my mom asked me the question one day, and I asked her "out of what number?" I thought it was a perfectly intelligent question (since the number could be anything) and she said 100. So I was 100% certain. What bothered me though, was that I would still hear other people quote other percents, yet my mom always told me the number was 100. It took me a while to realize you didn't always have to be 100% certain!

CB

i could swear eleventeen was a number for the longest time -- it still sounds pretty convincing.

erin

When I was about five or six I remember sitting in the school dinner hall boasting to my friends that I could count all the way to a thousand. Demonstrating I counted 1, 2, 3, ..., 99, 100, 101,... 108, 109, 1000. Incidentally one of the boys to whom I was boasting managed to count to 3000 without cheating when he was sixteen, one boring afternoon.

Stephen K from Scotland

i used to believe that the number 4 was female, 5 was male and 6 was female.
4 and 6 would fight over 5 because they were so jealous of each other for being right next to him

msvedder

I used to believe that numbers had gender, that the odd numbers were boys and even numbers were girls.

Evelyn

I come from Norway. When I was a child I believed that twenty and seventy was the same number, they sounded alike to me, in norwegian. So when I was told to count to a hundred I counted ...28,29,80,81...

Kim

When I was six I didn't know about carrying numbers (who does?). I thought that 66 + 66 = 1212 and proceeded to write this and many other incorrect equations on a piece of paper. My dad told me that was wrong but I argued with him about it.

Anon

When I was about 4 I decided that if you were born in a bigger year, that meant you were older. So if I was born in 1965, that meant I was older than someone born in 1964. Because 65 is bigger than 64. Just like being 4 years old was bigger than being 3 years old.

jen

I had a little number puzzle where you fit the numbers 1-12 into notches. When I finished, I was so proud, because I could count all the numbers on the puzzle, and I was convinced that since 12 was such a huge number to a small child, there were no numbers higher, so I'd triumphantly shout, "Look! I can count to the end of the numbers," at random intervals.

margie

When I was six years old, a relative from Czechoslovakia visited Florida, and was staying at my grandmother's house. When I met him, I was playing with my Super Speak & Math, and pushed in 4, the answer to my problem. Jokingly, he said "Oops! You pressed 2!" and I felt sorry for him. He seemed to speak English well, but he didn't yet know the American number system.

Vince

When I was about three years old, my two older sisters wanted to be teachers when they grew up so naturally I became their test student for all the things they were gonna do when they grew up. They taught me my multiplication tables successfully up to two times ten. So at the age of three, I used to believe anything multiplied by zero equalled zero. And I was right. =)

ZachsMind