I vividly remember getting in trouble the summer before third grade. My mom overheard me praying on my younger brother’s pre-kindergarten anxieties:
“Geoff, kindergarten is so hard…”
He looks up at me, blinking his big, blue, Bambi eyes.
“… they make you add one hundred plus one hundred.”
He was totally freaked.
Yesterday I overheard Jacob talking to four-year-old Nate… in much the same conspiratorial tone.
“Oh yeah, Nate. What’s ten times ten?”
Without missing a beat, “One hundred. That’s so easy.”
See Geoff? I wasn’t that bad— I never even mentioned multiplication.