basilisks and rats

(in the car today)

A: Wombats live in Australia too.
C: I don't think wombats are real.
S: They are actually.
C: Basilisks aren't real. But anacondas can be like 30 feet long. A, that's as tall as our house.*
A: Wow!
S: Anacondas don't live around here. But black rats snakes do and they can be as long as daddy is tall. They don't bother people though; they eat rats.
A: Why?
S: Because their bodies evolved to digest them and they think they taste good. Do you think they're right?
A: Yes, but people don't eat rats.
C: Not usually, but I wouldn't be surprised if people living in the Warsaw ghetto did. A, a ghetto was a walled area of the city where people were forced to live. It wasn't very nice in ghettos but there aren't any anymore.
S: If people are really hungry they'll eat just about anything. A lot of people eat chickens, and eating rats isn't all that different from that. It just sounds grosser to most people.
C (deciding that A needed additional education): The Axis was made up of Germany, Hungary, Japan, (blah blah blah) and in 1939 they (blah blah blah) and Poland (blah blah blah for several minutes)
A: Wait! I need to say something!
S: Hang on, C. What is it, A?
A: Sometimes we see the moon in the daytime!

* Note the voluntary not-unkind engagement with his sister. I remain somewhat shocked every single time it happens, even when he is trying to show off.

(I won't regale you with yesterday's car ride, in which I taught C the differences between the mean, median, and mode in a discussion of "average" speed.)

in which we deal with our son's annoying one-upmanship by doing it ourselves

C: I know more than any of you about anything.
D: Everyone has different types of knowledge which they know best.
S: I know how to use logistic regression.
D: I know how to change the oil in the car.
C: Well I know most everything better than you, and EVERYTHING more than A.
D: A knows people's names better than any of the rest of us.
S: When people we can't remember show up at parties we ask A what their names are. (This is in fact true.)
C: Well that's not really useful information.

A: Five hours is a far car ride.
C: You mean a LONG car ride.
D: We are far away from Oma and Opa's house.

A: I can count to 100.
C:You can't count to 1000. I can count to any number there is.
S: You can't count to pi.
C: Pie isn't a number.
D: Pi is the name of a number that's 3.14 something...
A: I can count to ten in Spanish. Uno, dos...
S: "Cosine, secant, tangent, sine, 3.14159!"
A: tres, cuatro, cinco, seis...
C: Shut UP, A!
D: and it's interesting because it's an irrational number that goes on and on forever after the decimal point.
A: siete, ocho, nuev, diez!
D: That's great A!
C: Shut UP, A! So how do you count to it?
S and D: YOU CAN'T.
C: Wow, that's weird.
D: Invisible numbers are even weirder.
C: How can a number be invisible?
S: You mean imaginary?
C: (giggles) If it's imaginary it's not real!
S: That's right, it's not a "real" number, and you can't count to it either, but it's useful when you're calculating things.
C: So what IS it?
S: The square root of negative one.
(Numerous other questions arose that got too difficult to field since (a) C has no experience with negative numbers except arithmetically and (b) we were in the car and I couldn't try to demonstrate anything on paper.)

(At our potluck, all the other kids were off playing and C hung out with the grown-ups for a while. His method of making conversation was to quiz us on WWII.)
C: What was the Marshall Plan?
Brian: The Marshall Plan was the U.S.'s post-war plan for rebuilding the economic systems of Europe (etc. etc. etc.)
C (shocked): How did YOU know that?

And his shirt doesn't help either

C has had a series of "literature projects" due each week at school. Given his WWII obsession and unwillingness to follow directions, I suspect that his output has been rather different from what his teacher expected. The first week was supposed to be a "banner" about a book. C constructed a 3-dimensional military tank out of paper and attached it to a piece of paper (the "banner") with a string. I didn't see last week's, which was a mobile; I only hope that he didn't make the cutouts in the shape of swastikas.

This week, he was assigned to make a mask. His choice of character is not unexpected.

Yes, I tried to encourage him to choose anyone other than Hitler. Yes, I have an e-mail in to his teacher apologizing. Yes, I started to try to explain to him how Hitler's image remains very disturbing to a lot of people, but stopped when I realized I might be doing more harm than good. How to explain to a seven-year-old how the horrors of a war that ended before his grandparents were born are still so resonant?

more from the Fuehrer

I had the same reaction as this guy when C brought home his soccer "uniform" on Monday. Even more startling to me, however- the shirt is white. It is going to be covered in mud after the first game tomorrow, and I'm never going to get the stains out. Should I have a party for the whole team halfway through the season to convert from the white team into the tie-dyed team?

Given C's continuing independent study of WWII, I'm surprised he didn't point out the resemblance. Last night he asked me what started "the" war between China and Japan. I confessed to knowing nothing about it other than a vague sense of millenia-long cultural rivalries (which, of course, I could relate most closely to Nazism). He went on a bit about the U.S. not aiding Japan against China and Japan's motivations for bombing Pearl Harbor, which I also knew nothing about. I'll be needing to provide a lot more help with his research if he wants to trace back the antecedents to every war to the beginning of time. And I'll need to decide whether I should be actively engaging in my own study so I know what he's talking about.

darn librarians

I suppose I should be glad that the school librarians trouble to notice the books that interest C and direct him toward others they think he might like. But I kind of wish they weren't actively encouraging his current fascination with Hitler. His current pick is "World War II: Battles and Leaders." He asked me why Hitler commit suicide, what an atomic bomb does, and the definition of "execute." Maybe I should appreciate the fact that the discussion enabled a conversation that didn't involve him storming off in a huff, but....

When I casually asked why he liked WWII books so much lately, though, he said "because I want to think of ways to stop wars from happening again." Thinking that he'd come up with a rather sophisticated prevarication custom-designed to make me happy, I tried to elicit something more antisocial. "Sometimes, even though I don't like to think about people getting hurt, it's exciting for me to read about battles." He looked at me like I was insane, and said, "It's not for me." So just maybe we're raising a little pacifist after all.