Friday, May 30, 2003

O-V-E-R-R-A-T-E-D: And now, a final word on Spelling Bees, because for all the electronic ink I spilled yesterday, and for all the hours I watched on tv, I still can't get past concluding that the whole thing is bogus.

Look, it's great television, and great drama, but is spelling the best field towards which these kids should be devoting all these hours?

Yes, spelling bees promote knowledge of Latin and Greek root words. They increase vocabulary. They promote memorization skills. As one Bee brochure put it in the 1930s:
Business men, editors and educators generally agree that graduates of high schools and colleges are less competent in spelling than in any of the fundamental subjects such as arithmetic, geography and English. The Spelling Bee introduces competition among individuals who aspire to grade championships, establishes class and school spirit in the contests between grade winners and school champions and instills ambition not only in the best spellers who win the Washington trips, but among the thousands of boys and girls who, falling short of championships, resolve to better their standings in the next match.

Yes, but we've all got spell-checkers on our computers now, and the words being tested aren't words that are actually going to be useful to these kids at any point in their lives. The last five rounds contained ten completely useless words -- betony, hypozeuxis, dipnoous, aplustre, gadarene, symphily, peirastic, gnathonic, rhathymia and pococurante -- and only two that I've ever used in my life: seriatim, which every lawyer would know, and boudin, the blood sausage.

The words are obscure because they have to be: we've engineered a breed of super-geeks with driven parents, kids who do nothing but work on the Bees (some have been in 3-4 national finals), so that just testing kids on useful words doesn't cut it anymore. In essence, the Bee has succeeded: we expect bright kids to be able to spell in a professional, relatively error-free manner. By way of comparison, here's the final words from the first 22 years of the Bee:
abrogate, luxuriance, albumen, asceticism, fracas, foulard, knack, torsion, deteriorating, intelligible, interning, promiscuous, sanitarium, canonical, therapy, initials, sacrilegious, semaphore, chlorophyll, psychiatry, dulcimer

Every single word, save foulard, being common, everyday English, and all of them too easy to be used in this year's competition, Heck, as recently as 1983-85, the final words were Purim, luge and milieu.

Maybe the spelling bee has served its purpose. It's raised the bar so that unsatisfactory spelling doesn't get out of elementary school, and where the best kids can spell just about anything.

But why bother? Why not have them apply their brains to useful knowledge, like math, science, history, or geography -- areas where superproficiency does lead to a lifetime of benefits? Learn your math and science, and you could be a great engineer; learn history and geography, and you understand a complicated world; where does great spelling lead you?

One last thing: spelling bees are solitary affairs. You study on your own; you win as an individual. It is anti-social. They don't teach teamwork the way math competitions do (four students, twenty minutes, ten questions), and teamwork and social skills are so important as you grow.

Look, I'm all happy for Sai Gunturi. I'm glad he can spell sanguine, insalubrious, Veracruzano, marmoraceous, mistassini mistassini, solfeggio, piezochemistry, voussoir, halogeton, dipnoous, peirastic, rhathymia and pococurante. I just don't know what good it does him now that the competition's over.

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