The Spelling Bee. Do we care?

[devilgrrl]

I'm not dissing the spelling bee or anything but in the scheme of things, does it matter that an 8th grader can spell a word that most of us have never heard of or ever use in a sentence? Now that we know that this kid can spell, will he be coming up with a cure for cancer next? Is it really national news?

You tell me... :-)

[lonestarnot]

1. Hell No! We have spell check!

[Redstone]

2. Yes, and spell check is really great when

you type the wrong word, and it is actually a real word, though not theone you intended to type...

Yup, I agree...let's rely on Microsoft's opinion of correct spelling! And better yet, lets rely on they're expertise on the proper use of the apostrophe!

Redstone

(PS: I know you were being sarcastic..I was trying to be as well.)

[lonestarnot]

7. Well what do you rely upon when your too tired to proof your shit?

[Redstone]

41. Wait until you're NOT too tired, and do it then?

Maybe? Just a thought.

Redstone

[KansDem]

49. eye no watt ewe meen

Whoops...meant to type "mean" :)

[GiovanniC]

53. Know... Eye Don't Think That Happens

People no that spell cheque will all ways correct they're rightings sew their is know knead four humans two dew it.

[deadparrot]

3. No, no,

a thousand times no!

In all honestly, I don't get the obsession.

[ruggerson]

4. I think it's HUGH

n/t

[Maple]

5. Out of date contest

There are literally millions of words in English.

The average educated person knows about 20,000 of them.

For anything else, look it up.

Moving on....

[alcibiades_mystery]

6. It's not a "spelling contest"

It's a memory contest, and always has been. The point is to display the greatest facility at rote repetition. Does it really matter? No, no more than the strongmen contests I see on TV. More a freakshow of the memory, really. What was striking in the winning word today was that it became quite obvious that the winner remembered the word from previous drills even as he was spelling it. The trick was the second "G" in the word, and he spit it out without hesitation. He was looking at a word that he had memorized. Good for him. He's just as much a winner as those guys who flip logs and shit.

[funflower]

8. It's utterly unimportant, but so are lots of things we do in contests.

Inexplicably, my kids care a lot about kicking a ball through a goal. It probably won't lead to a job or help them cure cancer, but they seem to like it nonetheless.

[Sub Atomic]

9. As a dweeb, I think the Spelling Bee is an outstanding opportunity

for children to compete on a cerebral level.

As a San Diegan, I am appalled that the county decided to eliminate the Gifted And Talented Education program, or GATE program, from Lincoln Middle School because the Hispanics were feeling left out.

So instead of creating a GATE program for Spanish-speaking children in order for them to excel, the eliminate the GATE program in its entirety for that school.


<breathe in>
<breathe out>

[Ikonoklast]

10. Uv corse wee kare!

Evry buddy nows thet speling is verry impurtant tu ons ejumication. I pirsonilly tuk teh saem corespondince corses fowr speling thet Prezzident Bush tuk fer speeching, and luk howe suksessful he is tuday!

[fujiyama]

21. hay

u is speeking like a freeper.

is u 1 huf dem der disrupturs?

[Ikonoklast]

58. God, fujiyama, please don't do that to me

When I read your reply I happened to be taking a sip of coffee and promptly blew it out my nose. I needed a good laugh...thnx.

[fujiyama]

59. No problem!

Welcome to DU!

[Withywindle]

11. it deserves at least as much attention as sports...

I mean, honestly, do I care if some ridiculously overpaid guy or some overentitled high school kid can hit a ball with a stick or sink it in a hoop? It's not like it's any kind of skill with any value anywhere else in life. Are they going to cure cancer next?


Former regional spelling-bee champ here :hi: though you'd never know it to see my rough drafts now. For us language geeks, it's FUN, that's what it's about really*. It's a chance for the nerds to get a teeny eensy weensy bit of the spotlight that jocks and beauties take for granted. Why begrudge it?



*well, that and the cutthroat competition of course. :evilgrin:

[OneBlueSky]

12. the kid who won last year had a good perspective . . .

something like "When I apply for a job, they're not gonna be too impressed that I won the spelling bee" . . . still, it's fun to watch . . . that second place kid today was a hoot . . .

[WillowTree]

13. I remember hearing the results...

....of the National Spelling Bee finals every year for ten or fifteen years or more. Of course it's not major news, but it's also nice to see a story about kids once in awhile that doesn't involve youngsters getting in trouble or being kidnapped and murdered. The kids work really hard to accomplish something and it's nice to see them getting credit for that, too.

Not everything has to be so serious all the time.

[blue northern]

14. It beats Survivor or American Idol IMO.

But that's not saying much.
There's worse things to see than smart kids.

[TrogL]

15. Canadians were in the Bee for the first time

One girl got to the ninth round before being knocked out for a word that wasn't even English - it was Norwegian.

My understanding is the Spelling Bee racket is every bit as wacko as Little League Baseball at its worst.

[KamaAina]

60. Canadians in the Bee? That could get ugly...

"Your word is 'color': a hue or shade such as red, green or yellow."

"Colour: C-O-L-O-U-R".

"Oh, I'm sorry, that is incorrect..."

[expatriate]

16. What bothers me about the spelling bee

is the impression I get that it's simply rote memorization - that the kids have memorized long lists of words. Do they know what the words mean? Can they use them in a sentence? Or have they just learned to spit out a certain sequence of letters when they hear a particular word (sound) called out?

To me, just learning to spell words, many of which are obscure, has very little point. About like pumping kids all school year so that they can spit out the right answers on a standardized test. Not much learning going on, just memorizing what you need to be able to puke up come test time.

And it sure isn't national news. But then, what reported in the mainstream media is?

[Bluebear]

17. Have you watched it?

It's really beyond rote memorization of words. You see the kids saying "Is the word derived from the French 'mer' meaning sea?" They are not dummies and I think it's nice for young people to have something other than sports to participate in.

[expatriate]

25. No, I haven't watched it - I'm in another country

and I also haven't watched commercial television since 1974. What I know about the spelling bee has been gleaned from the brief news reports in the newspapers or online - and the impression always given in those is that the kids learn to spell rather tricky words that are not in any way part of the normal lexicon. I seem to remember words that were specialized medical terms and words from languages other than English. So my impressions were based on limited information.

I'm glad to hear that the kids are doing more than just performing a trick, and that they know about the words. And I don't have anything against such a contest - heck, my schools used to send me around to scholastic rallies for English, a statewide equivalent of the spelling bee in other subjects.

I'm all for kids doing things other than sports, and if they're actually learning in the process of getting ready for the spelling bee rather than just memorizing words, more the better!

[Withywindle]

18. Well, when I was in it as a kid...

There were a lot of lists of words, but I definitely looked as many of them as possible up--context always helped me learn. I was good at memorizing then too, as long as it was words involved. A lot of the poems I memorized as a child are still on the ol' hard drive.

They tend to be bookish kids to begin with. When I was a kid (not anymore, alas), I used to have "perfect spelling" the way some people have perfect pitch in music: if I ever saw a word in print once, I would never misspell it again, and if I saw a word misspelled somewhere I could always find it and point it out. And I had my nose in a book 24-7, so I saw a lot of words. :) It's an uncommon talent, but not that uncommon, and a lot of spelling-bee kids have it. Most of the words I learned then, I do still know, and I know what they mean. There is an awful lot of study and memorization involved, but I'll bet you'll find that virtually all spelling-bee participants read and write at levels far beyond their age, organically.

[expatriate]

27. This is good to know.

From the limited reporting I've seen on the spelling bee, the emphasis was always on a kid spelling a difficult and obscure word.

I had "perfect spelling" too. If I've read a word, I can spell it (with some notable exceptions, which always look spelled wrong to me). I aced every spelling test in school, but never once studied for them or wrote the words ten times each like we were supposed to. I read all the time, so the school spelling tests were nothing difficult.

I'm glad to have a better understanding of the spelling bee - it's usually trotted out briefly in newspapers as a near freak show - or was when I was still in the USA and reading about it once a year. Sort of a "look at the hard weird word this kid spelled" thing. It didn't give much of a background on just how the kids get ready for it and if they're doing any learning more in depth than just memorizing the spellings.

[Tansy_Gold]

46. As a long-ago participant and "coach" when my daughter

competed, I have to agree with your experience, Withywindle.

It's not about rote memorization of lists of words, but learning how to learn. My daughter and I devised ways for remembering things like whether "collision" had one L and two SSes or two Ls and one S.

We also learned new words, and how to use them, where they came from, what their components meant.

I think those who disparage competitions like the Spelling Bee or the Geography Bee are those who either aren't good at those skills or have no interest in them. But as others have said, is skill at spelling any more or less important to the great scheme of things than playing a guitar very loudly, kicking a bizarre shaped piece of inflated pigskin between two upright poles, or slapping blobs of colored pigment on stretched sheets of canvas?


Tansy Gold, who every once in a while gets to use "chromotrichial" in a sentence

[Withywindle]

63. Ha, my mom coached me too...

...she was quite the taskmaster. :scared: But I appreciated it.

My Mom's not a native English speaker, and though she's fluent and was back then too, she learned a lot as well about how the language works as we studied Greek and Latin and Germanic/Old English roots and all that, which is very useful to know in lots of ways that still come up all the time. There's always more to learn, always room for improvement. I certainly think the experience has served me well.

[tx_dem41]

26. I agree with your remarks on the memorization issue.

That has always seemed like a scam to me.

[JNelson6563]

30. Not necessarily

I've seen some of these super-spellers interviewed. They have studied the language, they know word origins, the root-words and all the technical stuff. They cannot possibly memorize all the words so they must have a thorough knowledge of the language.

I've seen the footage of the boy who won. Watching him run to his dad and burst into tears, I can practically feel the stress he was under and the immense relief after winning. Amazing.

Julie

[Piperay]

19. It's more important than lots of stuff

they cover but less important than many things they don't cover.

[fujiyama]

20. I'll agree it's not really very relevant.

I saw some of it and while I used to dismiss spelling bees as useless exercises in rote memorization of a dictionary, I actually got the feeling that most of those that participated in it were quite intelligent.

The reason is because of the reasoning involved to sound out the word. I certainly could see how the skills they aquired could help them with langugage in general - both in English and picking up other Latin based languages.

At the same time though, it's nice that a young person is getting attention for something positive, rather than for shooting up a school or something.

I do wish that the Intel/Westinghouse competetion, which is far more prestiguous and requires real research, got nearly this much attention. Those people deserve it even more.

[BlueIris]

22. I'm kind of in awe of super-spellers.

I've really been on this improve-my-spelling kick for the last few years. Mine isn't terrible, but it could be better. I'm not ignorant of things like usage and grammar in English, but for some reason, I have twenty to twenty-five common words that I habitually misspell. That's silly at this age (post-college). So, I've been trying to learn techniques to polish up my spelling skills, for my own edification if nothing else.

[WilliamPitt]

23. I care

It is always nice to see smart kids.

[tx_dem41]

24. I just wish that people could spell ordinary words correctly....

when communicating over the Internet.

[LostinVA]

28. That is an excelent point, txdem. I agre.

[soup]

36. Me, two.

sorry. :hi:

Your post made me smile and brought on an instant case of the sillies. :crazy:

[One_Life_To_Give]

62. I would settle for Journalists being able to spell in

their own newsprint stories.

[sendero]

29. Frankly...

... when I see the atrocious spelling of many obviously intelligent people right here on this board, yes I do care :)

As far as practical value, I agree - most of the words used in high level bees are absurdly obscure, nobody really needs to know them.

On the other hand, it does test a skill - the ability to remember sequences of letters with no particular value and tie them to a word.

After all, we have sporting events like the discus throw, how many times do we need to toss a freaking cannonball? :)

[tx_dem41]

31. I bet you spellchecked your post VERY carefully.

:)

[sendero]

34. I know you are not going to believe this...

... but any spell-checking I do is with my own head, and the times I do make mistakes it is mostly a typing error. Yes, I participated in spelling bees as kid but I sucked at it. I could spell anything, what I couldn't do was stand on a stage and spell aloud words that I knew cold :)

I'm not ragging on anyone, my point is that an intelligent and well-thought out point can be severely marred IMHO when there are loads of misspelled words. I realize that is not something we all agree on, and I'd fully admit that I've read some really great stuff from folks who cannot spell their way out of a paper bag. But just like in real life, appearances do matter. If you walk up to me wearing dirty clothes and picking your nose, I am going to reach conclusions about who you are.

"Its really to bad that loosers over their can't spell" :)

[tx_dem41]

35. I'm much the same way actually.

"Looser" is my biggest pet peeve.

[seaglass]

32. My 8th grade son came home from school and turned on ESPN

to watch it - so yes, I think it's important - he's a smart kid but he's more likely to memorize baseball stats than spelling words.

Plus it was fun, of the 4-5 words I saw, the only one I knew how to spell was laetrile and I'm a fairly good speller.

OK, and I'm weird, when the kids got the words spelled correctly it brought tears to my eyes.

[AngryAmish]

33. Yeah

It's cool and fun. Resume the relentless crushing of your enemies next week.

[lewiston]

37. Spellbound

is a 2002 documentary. It was nominated for an Oscar but was beat out by 'Bowling for Columbine'. If you get a chance check it out. It will change you perspective on spelling bees.

[dryan]

38. Thi is a big thing for kids....

in fact I think we should have more of these type of competitions and not fewer. When I was a little girl I remember The "National Geography Bee"--what happened to that?

[alcibiades_mystery]

39. DU should have a spelling bee

First person to spell "hypocrisy" correctly wins. ;-)

(My favorite botching of "hypocrisy" was "hippocracy," which I took to be a government of hippos...)

[shadowknows69]

40. Anything that causes a child

to actually use and excercise their own brain as opposed to letting a microprocessor do it for them is a good thing IMO.

[Dorian Gray]

42. I don't know about The Scripps Spelling Bee

but I saw The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee on Broadway last weekend, and it was funny as hell!

I don't see what the big deal is. These competitions are extra-curricular activities, like sports. Some parents take them way too seriously. Some allow their kids to have fun with them. I loved the documentary, Spellbound! It's taken too seriously by some (just like the Westminister Dog Show), but I don't think they are detrimental to society or anything!

In the scheme of things? Not all that important. But, I only heard a ten second blurb on the news about it, anyhow!

[Telly Savalas]

43. 50% of the items folks like CNN report is irrelevant fluff.

Why single out the spelling bee?

[AVID]

44. if the winning word were impeachment

hell yea

[PassingFair]

45. It certainly pales in comparison...

to some moron catching a ball. Or throwing a ball. Or kicking a ball.
Or hitting a ball. Now THAT changes the world! :sarcasm:
There is more drama in ONE spelling bee (and more to learn) than in a baseball game.
I'd rather waste an afternoon at a spelling bee than at a football game.

[Tracer]

47. An old, old spelling bee resentment that I just can't let go.

Damn! Every time a Spelling Bee comes up I recall the one Bee that I was in at elemtary school (grade 4 or 5?).

I was thiiiiiiiiiis close to being the winner, when I was asked to spell "colonel". And I did - correctly.

I was told I was wrong and to sit down! And the NUN said it was spelled "kernel".

Of course, she hadn't given a sentence in which to contextualize the word.

Oh, the little things that we remember for such a long time.

[One_Life_To_Give]

48. Not any more than some team being swept by KC

But what we do and don't say about a spelling bee says alot about how much we value it and associated tasks. If you don't value a 50,000 word vocabulary, then is there any reason for a child to learn more than a 100-200 word vocabulary?

[immoderate]

50. If people don't learn how to spell...

They will become freepers.

--IMM

[shrike]

51. I don't care about football

But God knows they'll play it anyway. It's a way that smart kids can compete. It rewards brain power, for a change. What's wrong with that?

[theboss]

52. I love the Spelling Bee

It's got everything. Stiff Competition. High Tension. Insane teenagers freaking out on TV. State parents. Pretentious British men.

What's not to love?

[spanone]

Hey! CNN just said Americans LOVE the spelling bee. WTF?

[spanone]

54. Hey! CNN just said Americans LOVE the spelling bee. WTF?

[mondo joe]

55. Yeah - Americans are too interested in education!

The Bee is great - my family watched it all night.

Honestly, in a cuulture with a dolt as president why so much dissing of a competition about EDUCATION?

The Bee is NOT about rote memorization - there's a lot more going on.

[Texasgal]

56. What's wrong

with having SMART kids who apply themselves and want to be shown nationally?

I think the spelling bee is great! We should care about it, those kids are going to be our future generation. Hell... it beats kids sitting around playing video games all day!

[otohara]

57. I Care - Love The Bee

Those kids worked their asses off - my kid somehow made the first cut in state and they gave us a book of words. My word, I couldn't pronounce half of them to help my son.

Spelling is important.

[bobbieinok]

61. spelling bees not impt b/c we have spell = math lessons not impt b/c

we have calculators