“Miss Zarves drew a triangle on the blackboard. ‘A triangle has three sides,’ she said, then pointed to each side. ‘One, two, three.’ She drew a square. ‘A square has four sides. One, two, three, four.’
“She walked around the cow to the other side of the board. She drew a pentagon, a hexagon, and a perfect heptagon.”
There it was: a little mathematics lesson in the middle of a storybook, Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger by Louis Sachar. I was reading the book to our children, and Kenneth, who was 6 years old at the time, had to interrupt. “What’s a heptagon?” he wondered. He didn’t ask what a cow was doing in the classroom. That was part of the wackiness you could expect at Wayside School. The book promptly answered his question: A heptagon has seven sides.