Posted on 05/28/2012 9:17:40 AM PDT by Steelfish
Girl, 6, Is Youngest Ever in National Spelling Bee
JOSEPH WHITE May 28, 2012
The youngest person ever to qualify for the National Spelling Bee was running around in a stream with a friend, hunting for rocks. Suddenly, she came charging up the bank and headed straight for her mother.
"Hold on to that basalt," Lori Anne Madison said in a bossy 6-year-old's voice, "and do not drop it."
"Go away," her mother, Sorina Madison, said playfully.
She talks at 100 mph. In the last few weeks, she has won major awards in both swimming and math, but one accomplishment above all has made her an overnight national celebrity: This week, the precocious girl from Lake Ridge, Va., will be onstage with youngsters more than twice her age and twice her size as one of 278 spellers who have qualified for the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
"She's like a teenager in a 6-year-old body," Sorina said. "Her brain, she understands things way ahead of her age."
It's hard to argue with that, especially after spending a couple of hours with Lori Anne and her friends as they splashed in the waters on a sunny day at the Scotts Run Nature Preserve in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.
There's been no need for Lori Anne's parents to push her to do anything — because she's already way out in front dragging them along. Some kids are ahead of the curve physically, mentally or socially from a very young age. Lori Anne is the rare exception who defies the norms in every category.
She hit all her milestones early, walking and talking well before others in her play group. She was reading before she was 2.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
When I was in elementary school, only middle schoolers were eligible to go.
I bet she can spell better than Obama.
“C-O-R-P-S-M-A-N”
Just wait until the hormones kick in and she’ll suddenly forget everything. My younger sister was a whiz until she discovered boys.
How about S-Y-C-A-C-U-S-E? Some idiot kenyan needs to stay at the Holiday Inn Express..
Cool. But I hope her intellectual preciousness eventually comes to something more substantial than facility with navigating the irrationality of English orthography.
The fact we English speakers have to spend any brain-power on spelling is the unfortunate result of having frozen our spelling too early. I would be perfectly easy to have completely rational spelling for English the way Russian and Korean have scripts which exactly encode the pronunciation, but no! We had to follow Samuel Johnson and pin down our spelling with remnants of the history of languages and irrationalities like the decision to transliterate the Greek phi as ph, rather than f, frozen in. In the days of Shakespeare and the King James translators there was not a fixed system for spelling English, and they managed to produce the finest prose (and blank verse) the language has ever produced. (Did not fretting about spelling help?)
I bet she can spell better than Obama. ... “C-O-R-P-S-M-A-N”
You can't lay that one off on the Head Idiot ... cause as we all know, it's two words ... C-O-R-P-S-E ... M-A-N!
Two Words -—> Rebecca Sealfon
Highly gifted kids are the hardest to raise! Argh! She sounds like a cutie but it’s not always a “gift.”
I loved the part about the private school said she was too bright to attend and needed to be homeschooled.
But .. but, she’ll need to be properly “socialized”*
Spelling Bee’s as far as I know, are a uniquely English-language phenomena. So illogical and unphonetic is our language—due to its pigeon/bastard origins—that it takes a tremendous amount of raw memorization—which teens and younger excel at—just to spell in a basic literate sense.
Spelling Bees are NOT needed in more logical, phonetic languages like German, French, Spanish, Italian etc.
It’s strange how we’ve turned the worst part of our language—its illogical, rule-less nature in spelling—into a competition and mark of pride for kids.
I wonder what our kids could do if they didn’t have to worry about spending a lot of time memorizing spelling, just to attain basic literacy?
Well, based upon what is running our public education system, the additional time would be spent teaching the kids about ‘fisting’ and other degenerate practices theprogressives deem ‘worthy for indoctrination’.
Keep this little kid as far away from public school as possible!
Yes, it is complex -- but it's eminently teachable. We have 44 sounds that we have to stuff into 26 letters. It's tough, but the result is the most flexible and most widely-used language on Earth.
And, trust me, the French and the vaunted, "perfectly-phonetic" Spanish-speakers misspell their languages all the time. It's all about the education.
Hamlet's soliloquy suffered nothing from having been originally written
To be, or not to be, that is the Question: Whether 'tis Nobler in the minde to suffer The Slings and Arrowes of outragious Fortune, Or to take Armes against a Sea of troubles, And by opposing end them: to dye, to sleepe No more; and by a sleepe, to say we end The Heart-ake, and the thousand Naturall shockes That Flesh is heyre too? 'Tis a consummation Deuoutly to be wish'd. To dye to sleepe, To sleepe, perchance to Dreame; I, there's the rub, For in that sleepe of death, what dreames may come, When we haue shuffel'd off this mortall coile, Must giue vs pawse. There's the respect That makes Calamity of so long life: For who would beare the Whips and Scornes of time, The Oppressors wrong, the poore mans Contumely, The pangs of dispriz'd Loue, the Lawes delay, The insolence of Office, and the Spurnes That patient merit of the vnworthy takes, When he himselfe might his Quietus make With a bare Bodkin? Who would these Fardles beare To grunt and sweat vnder a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The vndiscouered Countrey, from whose Borne No Traueller returnes, Puzels the will, And makes vs rather beare those illes we haue, Then flye to others that we know not of. Thus Conscience does make Cowards of vs all, And thus the Natiue hew of Resolution Is sicklied o're, with the pale cast of Thought, And enterprizes of great pith and moment, With this regard their Currants turne away, And loose the name of Action. . .And gains nothing by being fit into the Procrustean bed of modern orthography.
Dude, I get your point. But I don't find it an unsurmountable challenge. I'm not one for artificially modifying the language. The French have tried it for centuries and are losing the battle.
Just study your spelling and consider it your penance for being born into blessings of the Anglosphere.
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