For the third time in my career, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve participated in a spelling bee, but no, not as a participant (my eighth-grade classmate, Ermalinda, beat me, and others, out).<\/p>\n
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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122i School in Manuelitas.<\/p>\n
Most recently, I was one of four pronouncers for the Colfax County Spelling Bee, in Raton, a couple of months ago. As Raton\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Bob Stewart, coordinator of the event thanked me for my services and asked if I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d be willing to do it again, I thanked him, the experience being so enjoyable.<\/p>\n
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. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153But what if a student begins to spell a word, backs up to correct it and…,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I was tempted to ask, but before I could, Stewart cited chapter and verse for each conceivable situation.<\/p>\n
And what if the pronouncer mistakenly gives the same word to a different contestant? Well, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s in the instructions as well.<\/p>\n
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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153warm up\u00e2\u20ac\u009d round. Here, we asked them to spell words like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153cat\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153dog.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Such a challenge.<\/p>\n
And suppose a child flubs on one of those words? Do they get disqualified? Oh, I forgot. That eventuality is in the rulebook too.<\/p>\n
So, months later, when Anamika Veeramani won the National Spelling Bee with the word \u00e2\u20ac\u0153stromuhr,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she had to have known all the rules.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I view spelling bees as a kind of bookish free-throw contest. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re 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 . . .<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
Far from it: One of the protesters carried a sandwich board with the message, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Love the kids, love the bee, hate the spelling.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Some of the sidewalk cruisers wore black and yellow bee outfits, with antennae on their heads.<\/p>\n
The gist of the protest, the literacy council members explained, was a desire to simplify spelling, to allow \u00e2\u20ac\u0153thru\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to be considered a correct substitute for \u00e2\u20ac\u0153through.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d In fact, one man said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Enough is enuf.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Though they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153L-O-L,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as a term for \u00e2\u20ac\u0153laughing out loud,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153lots o\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 luck,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or whatever.<\/p>\n
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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve had writers who never got the there\/their\/they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re matter straight, and know one seems to have come up with a way to teach proper spelling and word choice to all.<\/p>\n
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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a rule, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153\u00e2\u20ac\u02dcI\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 before \u00e2\u20ac\u02dce,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 except after \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcc.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Weird!<\/p>\n
In our lifetime not much is going to change. But it was a nice For the third time in my career, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=622"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":628,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622\/revisions\/628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}thot<\/del> thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"