Learning the rules.

My son Spencer is learning to read and write the English language (as I think we all still are). As a result, he enjoys spelling out words instead of just saying them. This all began with him answering, “N-O” to questions instead of “No,” which has now expanded to include a variety of short words.

Unfortunately for him, he was born in America, where we speak the stupidest language on the planet. As a result, he’ll use spellings which are wrong, but which make sense given what he’s already learned. So, he’ll say, “D-A-D-E” for daddy and “M-A-K” for make and “M-O-R” for more. Whenever he does this, my first impulse is to correct him, the same way I do when he says, “Daddy, I catched the ball.”

But I stop myself because I realize that he is at the point in his education where he needs to learn the basic rules before learning the medium rules before eventually learning the exceptions. If I overwhelm him right now with all the correct answers, he’ll be too confused to make any progress. So I praise him for practicing rules properly even though this makes his actual answers wrong.

On second thought, maybe English isn’t the stupidest language. Maybe it’s just a really great analogy for Christian ethics.