Throughout Sam’s life, the things he’s needed to learn had to be taught directly. You cannot imagine how important learning from context is until you are confronted with the inefficiency of hours and hours and hours of direct teaching.

As Sam has grown, he’s learned to generalize. He’s picked up more from context — but he had to be taught how to do that, too. Taught to imitate, taught to read context, taught to recognize idioms, taught to generalize.

I get tired just thinking about it.

Now, Sam is struggling mightily with a new problem. And I have to figure out how to explain what civil rights are. Do you know how often we toss out that phrase and we have no idea what it means?

That violates my civil rights.

Read him his rights.

They marched for civil rights.

Google it yourself, and see what a mess you get. Dear readers, can you help?