It became clear to me yesterday that either I or my son's teacher has failed him in one distinct but important way.
We were driving from home to my future stepson's baseball practice last night when my son announced that he was going to count to "ten hundred."
"Ten hundred," I told him, wasn't a number. What he was thinking of was one thousand.
He brushed off that information as trivial to the task he was about to undertake and began counting aloud.
"1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 ... 45 - 46 - 47 - 48 ... 71 - 72 - 73 ... 98 - 99 - 100."
He was flawless right up until that point, but then here's where things went horribly wrong.
"100 - 200 - 300 - 400 - 500"
"Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a sec. Do you realize that you're actually counting by hundreds there? Did you know it's actually 101 - 102 - 103 and so on before you get to 200?"
*Stunned silence from the back seat.*
He took a few moments to process that revolutionary information and then began to count again, starting for some reason at 220 and proceeding through about 370 before we made it to the park. And he did pretty well with this newfound world of counting beyond 100. There were occasional times when he'd have trouble when a ten turned over, i.e. saying something like 229, 203. I assume he was trying to mentally picture these numbers that seemed ridiculously cumbersome and easily mistook "30" for "03."
Still, that overcomeable error is small potatoes to skipping entire swaths of numbers by virtue of simply not understanding they exist. I must pay better attention from now on.
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