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.
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?)
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.
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?