I don't think that I have synesthesia, just a natural tendency to 'make stories' and 'quite an imagination' - but as a child, I thought that everyone saw the odd numbers as male, and the even numbers as female.
Here's what I thought around Kindy:
0 - neither boy nor girl
1,7,9 - males who are masculine and fit the model.
2,6,8 - females who are feminine and fit the model.
3,5 - males who have don't fit the steriotype
4 - female who don't fit the steriotype.
I thought 8 was the most obviously female, with all those curves, and that 7 was clearly the meanest, with that pointy elbow. As an adult I heard the joke that ends 'because 7 8 9!' and agreed that it was the kind of thing 7 would do, but that clearly 7 hasn't been eating much of anything lately, because it's so skinny!(Even now, I'm noticing that the 7 in this type font are a little unbalanced: I prefer my sevens to have a bit longer downstroke relative to their 'hat' width.
Later when trying to learn the 7 times tables I saw that 7 is indeed a meanie!
I remember that I got in trouble because I wanted to write the 2's with the little circle, so they would by more clearly 'girly' - but the teacher told me that beginers had to write 2 without the little circle. I also prefered to make my 4's that looked more like an H, than an A, because I felt that the open tops were more feminine: open and enclosing,like a hug while the closed top 4 was more masculine: Pointy and sharp, like an arrow.
I had a preety steriotypical view of males and females in 1st grade, but I think it's interesting how my thought processes worked, and how I wanted the data to fit the theory.
I asked DS12 last night if he assigned gender to numbers. He said:
8 - neutral
2,3,7 - female
1,6,9 - male
So much for my literary psychoanalysis of 7 and 8!
DS's next question was:
'Does 10 belong with 1-10 or 10-19?'
nice leap, I thought.
Smiles,
grinity
