We buy a lot of yogurt: everyone in the house eats it, and so we head to the store on a regular basis on a yogurt run. This evening, L accompanied me after some hesitation: she was probably hopeful that she might get a little treat (we shared a bag of chips on the way home), but I was glad she was willing to go. She is not often.

We were standing in the checkout line, and L watched the customer-side screen that shows an itemized list of all the items purchased, along with the price.

“There’s a lot of things for sixty cents,” she observed.

“Well, what was the item we purchased the most of?”

She thought for a moment: “Yogurt.”

“So?”

“It’s all the yogurt!”

And then the real question I was interested in, for I’ve found myself these last months trying to teach my daughter some of the same things I’m teaching my eighth grade students. One of those skills is both the ability to infer and the ability to recognize when one is doing it. So I asked the question: “What skill did you just use?”

“Math?” A direct-from-observation-to-response answer: after all, she’d seen a lot of numbers clicking by, and it was what she’d paid most attention to.

“No. It begins with an ‘i’,” I prompt.

Nothing.

“Inferring.”

“Oh, right.”

The cashier, a young high school student, just smiled.