This is an exercise from the booklet of "Thinking Skills" we were given by the homeschooling lady when she visited. The reasoning behind it is that students are too often required to regurgitate endless lists of facts. Using words such as "cannot", "never" and "not" in sentences urges people to think deeper and in different way. They suggested such lists as,

Name 10 things that you could not clean

List 5 sounds that you have never heard

Name 10 things that you could not photograph.

The one we tried the other day was "List 10 places or things that cannot be destroyed by humans."

It proved to be quite a brain stretching exercise. We came up with such things as heaven, black holes, the iron core of the earth and the deepest depths of the ocean (although we did wonder whether oil spills and toxic waste would have an impact on this). Daddy was hovering around in the background picking holes in our ideas. When someone suggested the atom, he immediately reminded us that atoms certainly can be split. That's what atomic bombs were made for.

I suggested that a thought couldn't be destroyed by humans and my oldest son instantly disputed this. He said, "Of course it can. All you need is a rifle to shoot and the thinker of the thought is dead. So bye bye thought." But then his Dad pointed out that  if the thought had already been thought before the thinker was killed, perhaps the truth of the matter is that you've destroyed the thinker but not the thought. It was getting pretty deep. You never know where an exercise like this is going to lead.

I think one thing that appeared on Emma's list took the prize! Logan and Emma had been in one of their bickering moods. She was getting uptight because she felt that he was criticising all her ideas. So she wrote, "Logan's meanness." He didn't quite know how to respond to that. I could see him considering his options. If he responded with, "Of course that can be changed by humans, don't be so dense!" or something like that, it would prove her right, that his meanness could not be destroyed. Yet the alternative was that he had to be nice, which he didn't feel like doing. So he ended up just laughing and I think he thought her idea was the best too.