Murder school

Wendy and I have been homeschooling Pinkie Pie for a month now.  We didn't want to risk sending her to school in person, and the virtual school would be a nightmare for her.  She can't learn by watching a teacher on a screen for hours and hours.  We aren't sticking to any kind of fixed curriculum though, because it works much better if we just teach whatever comes up.  Of course we find things to bring up during lessons, but at least half of any given lesson is just answering odd questions that Pinkie Pie asks.

For example, during a history lesson the housing crisis of 2007 came up.  Then questions about the Great Depression got asked.  By the time the tangent was resolved I had talked about mortgages, the stock market, erosion, housing, banking regulation, and a bunch of other things.  Pinkie Pie isn't going to get the kind of focused education you get in school, but she sure is going to learn all kinds of stuff.

The best question so far though came up during a Math Walk on Friday.  (Math Walks are where she and I take a half hour walk and practice math as we go.)  Pinkie Pie asked "So, where would you stab someone if you wanted them to die really fast?"

This is the kind of parenting question I live for.

She clarified that she wasn't planning on murdering anyone.  She had a story in mind and wanted a character to be some sort of assassin or something, and to write a character that knows how to efficiently kill someone, the author needs to know how to efficiently kill someone!

My teaching fu was strong that day.  I lead off with the general observation that many wounds can be eventually fatal, but is it the brain, heart, and lungs that will kill you extremely rapidly if they are damaged.  I talked about the way the lungs take in oxygen, covered the gas composition of air, touched on photosynthesis, discussed blood flow and heartbeat, explained the heart - lungs - heart - body system, and explained the defensive purpose of the skull and ribcage.

In the end I summed up by telling her that any large amount of trauma to the centre torso is likely fatal, but that if you want to kill someone easily you can just stab them in the neck.  Necks are easier to attack than brains are, most of the time.

She seemed quite happy with the detail of my response, and presumably spent a bunch of time over the last few days writing scenes of mayhem and murder in her newest fictional world.

Either that, or she is going to stab me in my sleep someday soon.  

Probably in the neck.