To this day I’ll probably never know if I was that good of a teacher, or if Pinkie Pie was that good of a student. Maybe it was both. All I know is that Pinkie Pie was always eager to learn. And, what she wouldn’t or couldn’t learn from me she’d learn from other sources, like the Sunday School teachers when I took her with me to church.

I taught her to speak, read, and write. I also taught her various disciplines of math and science as well as other things she asked about. Of course, speech was no problem for her, as she’d modify her whinny into words she’d hear me and others say. Also, it always amazed me how she could move her lips to form words. I’d never seen real horses, that is horses native to my home world, do that.

The closest I’d seen was the result of people, from what I’d understand later, sticking peanut butter in a place in a horse’s mouth that was difficult for the horse to get to, so it’d only look like the horse was talking; and a human would act as the horse’s voice. Considering my experience with Pinkie Pie, I had to wonder if the peanut butter approach was torturous for the horse.

But, at any rate, Pinkie Pie had a great memory for shapes and names of shapes, which made learning how to read especially easy for her. Writing, on the other hand, was a whole other problem to conquer. The good news was, seeing how ponies in the My Little Pony series, other than unicorns and alicorns, wrote using their lips, I had a frame of reference for helping Pinkie Pie learn how to write. And, it was both amazing and funny to me to see her wiggling a pen or pencil in her mouth to write things down. It was funny to see her moving her lips to make the writing end of the pencil do what she wanted, and it was amazing to see how clearly she’d write.

Then, there was math.

I had no problems teaching Pinkie Pie that the basis of arithmetic and related mathematical disciplines is addition, and once she understood that, subtraction, multiplication, division, and other branches of arithmetic wouldn’t be that difficult to grasp.

In fact, she grasped the concepts of arithmetic so quickly that within months I was teaching her algebra, which she enjoyed. I guess it didn’t hurt that I also enjoy math. But, in teaching Pinkie Pie the various mathematical disciplines I was familiar with, she managed to teach me things about those disciplines I didn’t already know, or perhaps I’d forgotten about.

Another thing I had fun teaching her was different languages I’d learned in school as well as in New Zealand where I’d served as a missionary for two years. At first she had trouble grasping the concepts of different cultures having different labels for the same idea. When I presented Pinkie Pie with an object she was familiar with and it’s label in a different language, Pinkie Pie would, more often than not, correct me and give me the English, or American, label for it. But, eventually, as we took walks around my home town and she was exposed to how different people expressed the same ideas, especially hearing people who would speak Spanish and French, she became more accepting of the idea of different languages. She quickly picked up Spanish and various Polynesian languages I’d learned from me, French from my sisters, and Norwegian from my father, who’d been a missionary in Norway. And, to my surprise, she picked up other languages from programs she’d watch on television, including German and Japanese. After three years, she was quite the linguist.

Of all the things she learned, though, it seems that the most fun for her to learn were the various sciences I’d learned in my days of schooling.

I’d eventually learn about Pinkie’s sister, Maud, from the episode known as “Maud Pie,” as well as the rest of her family from the episode “Hearthbreakers,” that Pinkie Pie and her family would actually eat rocks. And, to this day, I can only assume that was the source of Pinkie Pie’s interest in geology. It was that, or because she saw me enjoying my own studies of it as much as I did. Whichever the case was, she had all sorts of fun learning about the different types of rocks, how they were formed, and also different rock-related discoveries, including prehistoric creatures, which had fascinated me since the first time I’d heard of them.

It really didn’t surprise me that much, however, that Pinkie Pie’s interest was specifically in the different varieties of prehistoric equines. When she found information on a variety of horse that apparently had feet instead of hooves, she found that extremely difficult to believe. To quote her, “If it didn’t have hooves, it wasn’t even close to being a pony.”

Another thing that didn’t surprise me, especially after seeing her in the Friendship is Magic series, was that she took an interest in cooking. And, like other subjects, she went to as many sources as possible to learn as much as she could about it.

I must admit, I have a very limited repertoire of foods that i know how to cook, and I frequently have meals that require the least amount of preparation.

On the other hand, whenever my parents came over, Pinkie Pie always asked my mom or my dad to teach her how to make something she’d never made before. And, after a few visits when the pink earth pony would ask these questions, my parents ran out of things to teach her; and she seemed to have a real talent in particular for making pastries. Her cakes and loaves of bread became really popular around town.

Now, on to the subject of religious studies.

Being a Latter-Day Saint, and having only had brief encounters with people of a few other religions, at least outside of my mission, I was really Pinkie Pie’s main source of information on religion, particularly the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. But, I wasn’t the only source the pink earth pony turned to for that.

When she wasn’t begging my parents to teach her how to bake something new, she was trying to start a religious discussion with my dad. And, she was one of the better students, from what I heard, in Sunday School. When I took her to church, afterwards I’d get reports about how Pinkie Pie was always asking questions on what had been taught that day. And, I must admit, I was never disappointed in Pinkie Pie’s interest in the subjects presented. Even better, she was applying what she learned at home.

When I read about Rainbow Dash and how her human treated her, I had to wonder how bad conditions were then and there that it’d require her human to keep her locked away the way he did. I wouldn’t learn until years after Pinkie Pie had returned to Equestria what a clopper is. Learning that clopping was, rather than just the sound of a hoof hitting a solid surface, something probably closely related to bestiality, I can only guess that if such behavior was going to become as commonplace as Rainbow Dash’s human was suggesting it was going to become, then it’s probably best that Pinkie Pie came and spent her life with me at a time before the Friendship is Magic show had even been thought of. What better way to defend a filly Pinkie Pie from such behavior, such people, than to send her back to before the turn of the millennium when that incarnation of the show wasn’t even heard of? Whatever this alicorn Princess Celestia and her sister Luna knew about what my world would become, a living, loving Heavenly Father knew more about it, and would know exactly what to do.