TEN BLACK DOTS

Mr. Crews made an auspicious entrance with We Read: A to Z, which did things with the alphabet that nobody'd done before; this does the same things with numbers that everybody's done before, and better. Counting black dots, one to ten, makes sense only when the dots themselves make sense-first as the objects named, then as elements in the composition, finally as representing a characteristic quantity. Here they're miscast as enormous seeds, misplaced as portholes on the upper decks of a boat and miscalculated (four) as knobs on a radio (an old-fashioned table model). Count this one out.