Math Curse 1995

THE WHOLE morning is one problem after another.

There are 24 kids in my class.

I just know someone is going to bring in cupcakes to share.

…

Jake scratches his paper with one finger.

How many fingers are in our class?

Casey pulls Eric’s ear.

How many ears are in our class?

The new girl, Kelly, sticks out her tongue at me.

How many tongues in our class?

I’M about to really lose it, when the lunch bell rings.

Jon Scieszka uses the vernacular of an eight-year-old caught in a nightmare of his own devising, brought on by taking his teacher’s advice : YOU KNOW, you can think of almost everything as a math problem.

Illustrator and designer team Lane Smith and Molly Leach show the increasingly zany possibilities of this instruction, until the narrator rescues himself (with fractions!) to find that a little arithmetic can, in fact, be useful.

At first glance, this page borrows heavily from the Walter Wick I Spy titles which were popular in this same decade with Big Bob and Ms May and at least forty million other children. But look closer. The narrator swirls in a vortex of pencils, paper scraps, grotesque child figures and numbers, numbers, numbers. The suffused background is the perfect background for the chaos, with chalk marks to ground it in Ms Fibonacci’s classroom : is that her in the yellow skirt reaching out a helping hand? The more you look, the more you see : even now, after thirty years of reading it, I’m discovering new layers.

Prolific children’s writer Adam Rex has described his encounter with Scieska and Lane’s work as a child : These books (and others) showed me that below the dollhouse of children’s literature there was a semi-furnished basement where people drew funny pictures and tried to crack each other up, and that there was maybe a space free on their orange, beer-stained sofa.

With a mathematician for a father, it made sense that toddler Big Bob noticed numbers everywhere, and could read them aloud from toddlerhood. Here he is with his sister, pulling on the tab of a book I don’t recognise. (Sorry, Safety Bay library.) She’s wondering if she’ll be helping her mother add up forever. (She will.)

He was my first child – I thought it was just interesting that his first word was clock and not Mum.

My little cupcakes loved this book with its cherry classmates, and I’m sure it influenced their futures. Big Bob is a financial analyst in a government department who loves sweets, and Ms May can whip up a spreadsheet as well as precisely calculated quilts.