I remember having a similar experience in the 6th grade. The teacher would put all the students on our little “stage” and we would then be eliminated upon the misspelling of any word. Don’t want to toot my horn too loudly but the OldPossum (then YoungPossum) was usually one of the last ones standing, and sometimes the only one standing.
Strangely enough, this was at a “one-room” school in a very rural county in Alabama. It was so rural that we had mountain lions still roaming those woods.
My 4th grade teacher was a 1-room school teaching veteran --while I was in her class, I learned she taught my godfather in the 1-room school out in the country across the road from where I lived the first 5 years of my life. My school experience was enriched by her superior skills that were built in that 1-room schoolhouse.