USA & UK A Number Less than One

One day some years ago, I was attending a parents’ evening for a Prep class in a school with a fine reputation. As often happens I imagine, the class was being taught by a young teacher new to the school in her very first year in the teaching profession. 

She was explaining how she taught numbers by writing 1, then 2, then 3 and so on. TO her annoyance and the evident disapproval of the other parents, I suggested that perhaps a zero might be a useful start to her list of number. When she counted stones on the desk, one, two, three etc. . . , she might also leave a space for “no stones”. If we start from the number one each time when we are reading a map, it might look as though it takes just a two mile walk to reach the three mile post instead of a three mile walk. 

Of course, this is easily rectified later on in Maths classes but children in the USA have a similar problem when they encounter elevators in stores and multi storey apartments. The ground floor is called the “first floor” and the floor above is known as the “second floor”. This can be very confusing for visitors from Britain. 

In Britain, the ground floor is NOT called the “first floor”. I would love it to be called “Floor Zero” but most lifts simply designate it as “Floor G”. The floor ABOVE is known as the “FIRST floor” and the one above is known as the “SECOND floor”. To my simple mind, this illustrates the fact that “ONE” is not the first floor we encounter. We START our journey on level ZERO. 

Another useful concept is provided by the many places which have underground car parks. These levels are often designated as “-1” and “-2” beside the buttons which we are required to press, so, in addition to thinking about zero, this immediately acquaints people with negative numbers and their common usage. 

When I suggested this a teacher in the USA, she agreed that the concept is certainly useful but only after the ground floor had been labelled “zero” and the floor above it labelled “floor one”.