WERE YOU A GOOD SPELLER IN SCHOOL?
Friends of education, fellow teachers, students and parents, the time for rejoicing is at hand. Just when you are feeling that education has failed to meet the needs of today’s students, and our international test results are abominable, one of our local private schools has come to the rescue. The Unnamed Academy has announced that they will be hosting the Calgary Invitational Spelling Bee! Can you believe it? An invitational spelling bee! I haven’t been this excited since I left the Bahamas where the annual spelling bee was only challenged for national importance by the pre-school age beauty pageant!
Just imagine, hosts of eager young students from select schools will be challenged to spell obscure, foreign, and archaic words under the watchful eyes and ears of a host of academic judges. The Calgary Invitational might someday challenge the king of spelling bees, The Scripps National Spelling Bee in the USA.
Scripps claims that the purpose of the bee is to help students improve their spelling, increase their vocabularies, learn concepts and develop correct English usage that will help them all their lives. The winning words over the past five years have been, “koinonia, marocain, gesselschaft, nunatak, and stichomythia.” Even my spellchecker does not recognize the first three words. I have a little problem with visualizing students using these words correctly and often in their daily lives!
A little research has taught me that the Scripps Bee is immensely popular. The National Spelling Bee first started in 1925 when nine newspapers joined together to host a spelling bee. Little did they know that 90 years later their literacy effort would reach 11 million students every year. That is a very commendable endeavour in terms of the numbers participating, and the encouragement of students to study spelling words cannot do any harm. I just question if it can really do any lasting good, as it is an isolated activity with little context!
Drilling down a little further (my new favourite term for research) I think that I uncovered the real attraction of the popularity of the Scripps contest. The winner takes home $40,000 US cash and a trophy to mark the occasion. Wow! If the age limit wasn’t 14 years of age I might be tempted to start studying. If you are really interested this year’s bee will be televised on May 27, 2019.
If the old fashion spelling bee can be so popular, especially in the non-Caucasian world (the last 12 winners have been of Asian heritage) perhaps there are other competitions from the past that might be revived. I am thinking of a youth Old Fashion Pentathlon. It would involve Horseshoes, a Pie Eating Contest, Skipping Rope, Jacks and a Plowing Contest! I think any of these events would be far more suitable character builders than spelling a word like,”koinonia.” By the way, can any of you use “koinonia” meaningfully in a sentence?
HINT: *koinonia is a noun that means Christian fellowship or communion, with God or, more commonly, with fellow Christians.
I was a little non-plussed about this, perhaps because I get stuck at the start with a question that swirls around, Why are they called Spelling Bees? Bees can't spell. What have bees got to do with spelling? Until I can't get past that, I can't get into any discussion about Spelling Competitions. But then I read, "Pie Eating Contest". And now that's stuck in my head.
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