Why I Love Science: Arithmetic at the maple house
12 July 2011As a kid I worked the retail counter at my parents’ maple syrup business (very Canadian, I know). We’d total up people’s sweet purchases, take their money, and make change for them.
Customer after customer, and I eventually got accustomed to doing this arithmetic in my head. I came to recognise how those numeric gymnastics represented stuff that happened in the real world; that they were a language that described things (like a litre of maple syrup) and processes (like summing amounts for a total purchase). Math became visual in my head.
That visualisation only increased when I started playing around with the calculators we used for those retail transactions. I found the squaring function especially mesmerising. Square 2 and you get 4. Square 4 and you get 16. Small potatoes. But square 16 and suddenly you’re off: 256. Square 256 and you’ve got a number that’s suddenly out of the range of a kid’s conception: 65,536. From there the numbers got so big so fast it made my head spin.
Those transactions at the maple counter were how I came to love numbers and mathematics.
That, and making words from the numbers by turning the calculator upside down.
Boobless. Heh.
There were always numbers around the Farm. Writing down weights coming off the blueberry cleaning line. Punching cards in the strawberry field. Keeping track of how many boxes or lugs were on the truck. The pattern/mathematics around stacking hay on the truck or wagon.