Arkady
President
Spelling bees seem like a good idea. They encourage kids to pay attention to the spelling of common words and they reward avid readers. At low levels of competition, they're closely tied to reasonable educational goals, making them a decent use of a child's time. Through the mid-1990s, even the highest levels of national competition were testing the kind of vocabulary words that educated people are likely to use in real life, such that the proper spelling of them had some value outside the bounds of spelling contests. But, that has changed. The words tested are so arcane that you may as well be having kids memorize all the numbers in the phone book -- it doubtless has some value in training their memories, but it's impractical as hell.
If you check lists of winning words in national spelling bees in the early-to-mid 20th century, you'll see they used to be things like "intelligible," "fracas," "knack," "meticulous," "vignette," "sycophant," "therapy," "initials," "milieu," and "kamikaze." They're words you've probably found yourself using in everyday conversation. They're words that it would be useful to know how to spell correctly. Now, look at the winning words in recent years:
Those words are all so obscure that the built-in spell checker in my web browser identified every single one as a misspelling, even though they're all correct. By comparison, it knew every one of the winning words from the first quarter-century of the spelling bee championship, and over three quarters of the words between the 1950s and 1995. I got a perfect 800 on the Verbal SAT (back before they scaled the scores upward), but in that list above, I only know three of the words (prospicience, Ursprache, and feuilleton), and the only one I've ever used is Ursprache. Has anyone here ever used any of them?
I don't fault the spelling bee organizers. They have to go with ridiculous words or the contest would never end, because there's a steady supply of kids who can spell every single "SAT word" without fail. Only by dipping into the arcana of bizarre, obsolescent, and specialized words can you weed your way down to a winner. But I think it's probably a bad sign that so many kids have gotten that good at spelling. It suggests they're spending an inordinate amount of time mastering a skill that will be completely useless to them outside of that brief window of spelling bee competition. That's underscored by the fact such a high percentage of the finalists are home-schooled: educated in a setting where they're free to spend obsessive amounts of time on one pointless skill, to the exclusion of learning other things. I'd much prefer if the popularity of the spelling bee, in the public's mind, gave way to a more diversified "Academic Olympics" approach, so that stage-parents urging their children to dominate the competition would at least be causing them to develop a useful foundation for higher learning.
If you check lists of winning words in national spelling bees in the early-to-mid 20th century, you'll see they used to be things like "intelligible," "fracas," "knack," "meticulous," "vignette," "sycophant," "therapy," "initials," "milieu," and "kamikaze." They're words you've probably found yourself using in everyday conversation. They're words that it would be useful to know how to spell correctly. Now, look at the winning words in recent years:
Succedaneum, prospicience, pococurante, autochthonous, appoggiatura, Ursprache, serrefine, guerdon, Laodicean, stromuhr, cymotrichous, guetapens, knaidel, stichomythia, feuilleton
Those words are all so obscure that the built-in spell checker in my web browser identified every single one as a misspelling, even though they're all correct. By comparison, it knew every one of the winning words from the first quarter-century of the spelling bee championship, and over three quarters of the words between the 1950s and 1995. I got a perfect 800 on the Verbal SAT (back before they scaled the scores upward), but in that list above, I only know three of the words (prospicience, Ursprache, and feuilleton), and the only one I've ever used is Ursprache. Has anyone here ever used any of them?
I don't fault the spelling bee organizers. They have to go with ridiculous words or the contest would never end, because there's a steady supply of kids who can spell every single "SAT word" without fail. Only by dipping into the arcana of bizarre, obsolescent, and specialized words can you weed your way down to a winner. But I think it's probably a bad sign that so many kids have gotten that good at spelling. It suggests they're spending an inordinate amount of time mastering a skill that will be completely useless to them outside of that brief window of spelling bee competition. That's underscored by the fact such a high percentage of the finalists are home-schooled: educated in a setting where they're free to spend obsessive amounts of time on one pointless skill, to the exclusion of learning other things. I'd much prefer if the popularity of the spelling bee, in the public's mind, gave way to a more diversified "Academic Olympics" approach, so that stage-parents urging their children to dominate the competition would at least be causing them to develop a useful foundation for higher learning.
