Art Wars: Science the Casualty

I'd bought this science kit for my 6 year old, using which she could make a periscope and a pin hole camera (Sorry, kiddo, this is what you get when both parents are engineers!). She likes to build such things – sometimes as something to play with, and always as something to brag to her friends.

Of course, not satisfied with this, I insisted on teaching her how a periscope works. By drawing a pic of how light reflects off the angled mirrors of the periscope:

Unfortunately, the lesson was lost in what followed:

She: “What is that thing you’ve drawn at the bottom?”

Me: “An eye. Of the person who is viewing through the periscope.”

She: “Humph… you don’t even know how to draw an eye.”

Me: “Oh yeah? Like you can draw any better.”

She: “Of course I can.”

To prove her point, Ms.Michelangelo drew some eyes for me:

Were her drawings good? Sure, but I was not going to be distracted by art in a science lesson. But also, I also got why she thought my drawing of the eye was worse than hers. Here is how our discussion continued:

Me: “Arey, you’re drawing the front view. But I wanted to draw the side view. ”

She: “Huh?”

A picture is worth a thousand words. So I drew the face around the eye I’d drawn:

From her expression, I realized that she got what I’d been drawing. And she had realized that my drawing of the eye was correct after all. Not that she would admit to any such thing, of course.

But while I may have won the argument, we’d gotten sidetracked from the lesson of how a periscope works. I guess a kid is like a horse… you can take them to the water, but you cannot make them drink. But if you think I’m gonna give up, kiddo, think again. This war ain’t over…