On the phone tonight, my youngest recounted to me the expected events of the next couple of days. "Tomorrow, after pre-school, I go to . . . and then, I go to . . . and then I come to your house!" He often does this, and it illuminates another habit of his: stating questions as facts. His logic works like this: if I say something that is wrong, Dad will correct it; if I say what I think is going to happen, or what I want to happen, and he does not correct me, then I can expect that thing.
It keeps me on my toes because I can't let a statement slip by that has an unplanned or incorrect event without negotiating with it. Here's another example: after dinner, I will have ice cream and candy for dessert. False. You will have one or the other. Crisis averted; because he is fine with amendments in the planning stage. It's just that when he thinks he knows how something is going to go down, he does not adapt well to being disappointed. Just like teaching, it's all in the planning.
Here's another beautiful linguistic trick he has developed, in addition to the several words that we have made up over the years for a various things (na-na for milk; babababika for a really serious tickle session). I call it the mathematical equation: tomorrow(x)=event. If something will happen tomorrow, he says "tomorrow." If it will happen the day after tomorrow, he says "tomorrow-tomorrow." We can go on like this through most of the week, because, to him "tomorrow-tomorrow-tomorrow" can mean much more than "that happens on Saturday."
To correct your math. Tomorrow(x)=event is creating a function, Tomorrow, that takes an argument, x, and saying that that function given an argument is equivalent to event. I think what you meant was something more along the lines of this:
ReplyDeleteevent(x)=Σ tomorrow, where Σ Is the sum from 1 to x.