If you have a small child, I recommend forcing them to complete dot-to-dot activities. There was nothing I enjoyed more as a child than drawing lines between consecutive numbers to determine the true identity of an object that looked precisely like a snowman missing an outline. When the picture turned out to in fact be a snowman, I’d be shocked and amazed–and delighted that I’d invested fifteen seconds into solving such a fantastic mystery. Here is a typical dot-to-dot:
What is this enchanting picture? Is it a bear with a predilection for mathematics or some other, non-bear object that somehow nevertheless has a bear head, bear claws, and bear feet? I ran the picture through an advanced computer simulator scholars call Microsoft Paint and came up with this:
It appears to be a bear after all, but there were a few surprises. First of all, it turns out he’s wearing a one-piece rectangular outfit that looks even shittier than I anticipated. Also, notice how he actually hates math. If your first exposure to math was an inane exercise in connecting dots in numerical order, you wouldn’t like it either.