The other day I gave Dirty Harry a spelling test.  I’m a homeschooling mom.  We do that.  He missed one word:  apples.  It’s not that big of a deal really.  With the spelling curriculum we use, your child only studies the words they miss on a given week.  So studying one word takes less than five minutes a day.  No sweat, right?  Wrong.

Dirty Harry was mad.  He launched into a hot tirade, proclaiming that he knew how to spell the word apples, that he just made a little mistake, that he wanted a do-over.  I agreed with him on the point that he knew how to spell it.  He was probably just rushing through, but that’s the consequence of rushing, and I told him so.  He fumed and complained some more.  I told him to get over himself and move on.  He misspelled the word apples on his test, so he would have to study it throughout the week and be tested again on Friday.  Period.  End of discussion.

On Wednesday our spelling curriculum dictates that the student do some sort of fun activity to study their words.  Dirty Harry likes to use the site www.spellingcity.com to play games and take little tests on this day.  But apparently he was still a little sore about the whole apples ordeal.

Dirty Harry:  Mom, I can’t think of any fun activities to do with apples.

Me:  Just go use the Spelling City site for a while.  With only one word, it should only take a few minutes.

Dirty Harry:  It doesn’t work well with one word.  This is stupid!  I know how to spell apples!  Can’t we just forget this whole thing and move on???  Blah, blah, blah, blah….

Me:  No, we can’t.  You missed the word on your test.  If you knew how to spell it, then you shouldn’t have been in such a hurry and made a careless mistake.  Why don’t you just take a piece of chalk and write apples on the chalkboard five times for your activity?  That should be extremely simple for you since you know how to spell it and all.

Dirty Harry grumbles and sulks but finally picks up the piece of chalk and writes the word five times.

“That was too easy,” he says, “so I’m going to just go ahead and write the whole alphabet for extra cursive practice, okay?”

“Ummm-hmmmm,” I answer.  I was busy in the kitchen, so I wasn’t really paying attention to what he was doing.  Later, however, I went to check his work, and this is what I saw….

Bwahhhhaaaahaaaaaahaaa!!!!

I’m sorry.  Please excuse my maniacal laughter, but something in me always finds great humor in my kids’ failures when they’ve persisted in giving me such a hard time about something.  It’s a character flaw, and I’m working on it.

He has since taken his spelling post-test and earned a hundred.  I don’t think he’ll ever spell the word apples incorrectly again in his life. 

But if he does, I hope I’m there to laugh my head off and remind him of this story.