Calendar reform suggestion from a 10-year-old child

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

18 December 2022

Recently, a grade 5 (CBC) child asked me why we have leap years – that is, sometimes February has 29 days instead of 28. I asked him if he knows that the Earth goes around the sun and he said yes. “How long does it take?”, I enquired, and he was quick to respond with the standard “365 and a quarter days”.

I explained to him that when February has 28 days, the year will be 365 days long; so, the quarter will not be counted. If the next year also has 365 days, the total duration skipped will not be half a day. After that, we shall be three-quarters of a day behind the earth’s movement around the sun. Thus in the fourth year, we need to add a full day so that our counting can agree with the movement of the earth around the sun.

The child thought about for a moment and made a profound statement: “So, actually, a year is the time the earth takes to go round the sun, not the 365 and a quarter days on the calendar” This is weighty because it means he has figured out that, if the duration of Earth’s revolution changed, then the number of days in a year would need to be changed.

His next question was equally profound: “Why is the extra day added in February instead of at the end of the year?” As I tried to figure out how to explain the history behind calendar days and months, he made the following suggestion:

“The whole world should agree to make all odd months have 30 days and all even ones 31 days – except December. Then every four years, they add one day in December to make 31. That way, children would not have a problem trying to remember the number of days in each month.”!

Think about that: seven months [January, March, May, July, September, November and December] of 30 days each makes 210; then five months [February, April, June, August and October] of 31 days makes 155. The total comes to 365. Then in the leap year, we have six of 31 and six of 30 to make 366. That’s ingenious!

For me, the best part about this is that it came from a ten-year-old child in grade 5. At a time when we are having a national debate on whether the new curriculum is helping develop our children’s intellectual capacity, this encounter suggests that we are heading in the right direction. It’s a good starting point for thorough and broader investigation.