Monday, August 15, 2022

Miss Bindergarten

 If you're not familiar with the wonderful Miss Bindergarten series of American children's picture books, then you jolly well should be. There are seven of them (plus some more simplistic early-readers books), written by Joseph Slate and quite amazingly beautifully illustrated by Ashley Wolff. Go and check them out if you haven't already!

The first book was published in 1996, so there might well be people out there who've grown up with the books and are thinking 'those kids must be thirty years old by now; that's a bit depressing, isn't it?' - well, sorry to depress you further, but actually they must be even older than that!

See, "Miss Bindergarten Stays Home from Kindergarten", as you can calculate from the calendar and the number of school days they've had so far, takes place in a November when the first of the month was a Saturday:


And the most recent year that happened when the first book was published was 1986! Miss B's class must therefore have been born in 1980 and 1981, and thus be 41 years old by now. She herself must be in her sixties - she's probably retired.

But I imagine she married Chief Dave and lived happily ever after, and Coco the cockatoo is no doubt still going strong - they live for absolute ages. So cheer up, old people who've been depressed by reading this!


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