What Counts

I remember carefully knocking small, colorful, plastic bears off of a 2x4 or a cigar box or a case of empties in my 1st grade (or was it 2nd grade?) classroom. We were learning addition and subtraction. I would line them up in a row and knock them down, one by one, to arrive at the answer for some complicated mathematical operation like 7 minus 3. I don’t remember counting on my fingers to accomplish the same calculation, but I suppose I did. It just wasn’t as memorable as defenestrating bears.

Using your fingers to do arithmetic is frequently considered bad form. It’s seen as unrefined—almost rude. I imagine that the practice of counting on one’s fingers probably offended the sensibilities of some self-assured school administrator at some point and then caught on as a new pedagogical war to be fought. (“Surely we can’t have children using their hands! That’s for babies! It’s undisciplined or… cheating! They can’t expect to be able to use their hands to do things in real life!”)

As it turns out, kids using their fingers has been linked with better mathematical abilities. Another bit of evidence for embodied and enacted cognition; there is a benefit to literally getting a “feel” for math.

While I suspect that disparaging finger-counting has to do with a feeling that the body is vulgar, there might simply be a general cultural bias against the literal. One insult often leveled at someone who doesn’t understand a verbal explanation is, “Do I have to draw you a picture?!” That might be good, yes; please do. Luckily, this perspective doesn’t seem to extend to math. Using a pencil and paper for ciphering or sketching out mathematical concepts can be vital, since they can quickly become complex. Past a certain point, there’s no easy way of getting around using a symbolic notation to manage it.

But there is some poetry, too, in that we use our digits (fingers) to type digits (numbers) into computers (bright rectangles that steal time from us). And here’s a fun fact: you can count up to 1,023 on your fingers by using them the way a computer would. Each finger represents one bit: on or off, up or down. With both hands in front of you and a slight change of perspective to a base-2 number system, you can count far, far higher than 10. Demonstrate this the next time you’re at a party and see how long it takes for you to be asked to leave.

We count with our fingers, with an abacus (or preferably plastic bears), with tally marks, with numbers, with computers and sometimes quietly in our heads. 

And we still hold up the fingers of our hand to let the hostess know we’re a party of 2.