Fun with Peter and Jane

Peter and Jane are the principle characters in many early reading books, as the British equivalent of the American Dick and Jane. Artist Jon Bentley revisits those primers, but adds a surreal adult twist in the series of oil paintings entitles “Peter and Jane, the Lost Episodes.”

‘Like many people of my generation, I learned to read with Peter, Jane, Mummy, Daddy and Pat the dog. As I struggled with the unfamiliar letters, my eyes where invariably drawn to the picture on the opposite page, full of strange details that drew me in and seemed to suggest a richer more mysterious narrative than the prosaic stories and dialogue on the written page’.  

See all eleven of the paintings, which are for sale, at My Life in Art. -via Metafilter


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Young kids quite quickly pick up some of the basic aspects of things like graph theory, set theory, and even abstract algebra in the right contexts. I've seen multiple mathematicians speculate that teaching such topics more and at much younger ages could raise both kids interests in math and their long term prospects in pure math. The issue is that for 99% of people these math subjects have no direct practical use (still great mental exercises in multiple ways though), and some efforts to teach such subjects in the past did so at the expense of more practical arithmetic and applied math that people need in today's world. While I'm all for kids exploring topics for sake of interests or to help improve abstract thinking, the basics still need to be covered.

But with the way math is taught in most schools now, the closest most get to pure math is a proof-centric geometry course (which some like much more than a cookbook algebra course), and those that trying to go more heavily into math in university hit a wall with an abstract algebra course that weeds out a large number of people from math programs.
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