For the third time in my career, I’ve participated in a spelling bee, but no, not as a participant (my eighth-grade classmate, Ermalinda, beat me, and others, out).
Once, while I was still teaching, Betty Leger and George Fidel invited me to be a pronouncer at West Las Vegas High School. Later, I served as a judge at the Baha’i School in Manuelitas.
Most recently, I was one of four pronouncers for the Colfax County Spelling Bee, in Raton, a couple of months ago. As Raton’s Bob Stewart, coordinator of the event thanked me for my services and asked if I’d be willing to do it again, I thanked him, the experience being so enjoyable.
Without reciting the entire lexicon of rules (and it would take a giant database to store all of them), let me stress that the rules cover every possible occasion. “But what if a student begins to spell a word, backs up to correct it and…,” I was tempted to ask, but before I could, Stewart cited chapter and verse for each conceivable situation.
And what if the pronouncer mistakenly gives the same word to a different contestant? Well, that’s in the instructions as well.
A few minutes later, I felt awkward, in front of an audience of contestants, teachers, friends, soccer moms and doting dads, asking each child to participate in a “warm up” round. Here, we asked them to spell words like “cat” and “dog.” Such a challenge.
And suppose a child flubs on one of those words? Do they get disqualified? Oh, I forgot. That eventuality is in the rulebook too.
So, months later, when Anamika Veeramani won the National Spelling Bee with the word “stromuhr,” she had to have known all the rules.
The eighth-grade student from North Royalton, Ohio, ought to have received extra credit just for spelling her own name correctly. The winning word defines an instrument, a rheometer, designed to measure the amount and speed of blood flow through an artery
The regional bee in Raton, for example, featured one boy who knew which devices to use, whether to stall for time, to request a dictionary definition, or to ask for the word to be used in a sentence.
I view spelling bees as a kind of bookish free-throw contest. It’s a welcome break from the overemphasis on sports, which tends to fill up gyms and football fields. But yet, the Raton Convention Center, the site of the recent spelling bee, was close to being full as well. Whether they’re learning spellings of arcane and archaic words, or brushing up their free throws, kids practice for months, even years to enter some kind of competition. It must be a great honor. But yet . . .
Would you believe a group of adults have protested spelling bees? The protesters picketed in front of the Grand Hyatt in Washington, D.C., where the finals were being held.
The group comprised a handful of members of the American Literacy Council. And what were they protesting? Was it the extreme pressure students face in this competition, the 83rd annual such event, sponsored by Scripps? Was it the fact that a non-athletic event has moved to the major TV networks, namely ESPN and ABC?
Far from it: One of the protesters carried a sandwich board with the message, “Love the kids, love the bee, hate the spelling.” Some of the sidewalk cruisers wore black and yellow bee outfits, with antennae on their heads.
The gist of the protest, the literacy council members explained, was a desire to simplify spelling, to allow “thru” to be considered a correct substitute for “through.” In fact, one man said, “Enough is enuf.” Though they don’t necessarily carry picket signs, other groups have objected to the mere idea of taking school time to drill the students on once-in-a-lifetime word spellings. Their are, after awl, any number of spell-chequers capable of doing that job four us.
Over the centuries, invasions, conquests, geographic separations and linguistic borrowings have made English spelling what it is. In their small way, cell phone texters, trying to squeeze in every letter before the traffic light turns green, are working toward simplification of the spelling. A youth, a former spelling bee finalist, said that texting on his cell phone has conditioned him to actually utter the words “L-O-L,” as a term for “laughing out loud,” or “lots o’ luck,” or whatever.
Do English teachers actually spend most of their grating grading time merely chasing spelling errors? What if everybody learned to spell? Would that mean teachers would need to pay more attention to content? At the Optic we’ve had writers who never got the there/their/they’re matter straight, and know one seems to have come up with a way to teach proper spelling and word choice to all.
While giving lot of credit to the studious eighth-graders for proving they can spell, I, for one long for a long-overdue updating of English orthography. Remember, there’s a rule, “‘I’ before ‘e,’ except after ‘c.’” Weird!
In our lifetime not much is going to change. But it was a nice thot thought.
I think your longing is justified. As far as I can tell, there are no spelling bees in Spanish. No real scholar would ever be eliminated, would they?
Nice comparision of the bee with a free throw contest. I’d bet that if 268,435,456 Americans, the larger bracket possible in a single elimination contest with no byes (first to miss loses, winner advances), nobody in the NBA would make the Sweet 16.