Skip

When you are six.

Skip — whose given name was Wren, though she had been called Skip since she was nine — started out, of course, counting one at a time. One, two, three, four, five… The sheep moved. The count was easy to lose. The count was hard to recover. By the time Wren was eight she could count to a hundred reasonably well, but she was bored.

She started to cheat. She did not, at first, call it cheating. She called it speeding up.

She would count one, two, then point at the next two sheep and say three, four. Then she would point at the next two and say five, six. The sheep had not changed. The count had changed. She was counting two at a time. By twos.

She tried it the next morning. It worked. She got to a hundred sheep in fifty counts. She still got to a hundred. The sheep had not noticed.

She tried counting by threes. She tried counting by fives. By the time she was nine her father — who had thought about teaching Wren formal arithmetic and had decided she did not yet need it — heard her one morning at the night-pen reciting:

"Seven, fourteen, twenty-one, twenty-eight, thirty-five, forty-two, forty-nine, fifty-six, sixty-three, seventy, seventy-seven —"

He stopped. He listened. He had never heard a nine-year-old count by sevens at speed.

He said: "Wren. How did you learn that?"

Wren said: "It is faster. The sheep do not know the difference. I count by sevens. I get to three hundred and thirty-six in forty-eight counts. Then I count the last six sheep one at a time. The whole flock takes me about half as long."

Her father, who was not an academy man but was a thinking man, sat down on the night-pen fence. He said: "Wren. You are doing multiplication."

Wren did not know this word. She said: "What is multiplication?"

Her father said: "It is when you count one number a certain number of times. Forty-eight sevens is three hundred and thirty-six. Which is what you just said. You are multiplying forty-eight by seven without writing it down."

Wren said: "I am only skipping."

Her father smiled. He said: "Yes. Skipping is multiplication. They are the same thing. The academy people write it 48 × 7 and they get the same answer. You are doing it in your head while you count sheep. That is the same operation."

Wren considered this. She said: "What about 48 × 8?"

Her father said: "Try it. Count by eights forty-eight times."

Wren did. She got to three hundred and eighty-four. (She started over twice; eights are harder than sevens.) Her father wrote 48 × 8 = 384 on a slate. The two answers agreed.

Wren was hooked.

By the time she was thirteen she could count by any number up to twelve. By the time she was fifteen she could compute any times-table answer for digits one through twelve, in her head, without paper. The family stopped asking her to count sheep; they had her compute the family's grain requirements instead.

When she was eighteen she encountered the academy through a travelling scholar. The scholar said: "You should not be counting sheep. You should be teaching multiplication." Wren had not thought of this. She thought about it. The next year she walked the ten miles to Tally, took the wagon to the next town, then a boat to the academy capital. She arrived. She demonstrated. She was admitted.

She has been at the academy for thirteen years. She is now called Skip — even by her father, who visits twice a year. She still calls multiplication skipping. The academy has, over the years, come to use her terminology with younger children, because younger children understand skip-counting before they understand multiplication. It is the same operation. Skip's word is the kinder one.

In her classroom, she begins every first-day lesson the same way. She writes on the board: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10. She says: "What comes next?"

The children — always — say twelve.