The Spelling bee

[Guest Felonies!]

Don't knock the spelling bee. I came so very close to making it to Washington in 8th grade. And won my school's bee 3 times. This kids are extremely smart, and puts in tons of time and effort to get as good as they do. And like we said, most of them end up very successful in life.

 

It's hardly memorizing the dictionary, either.

I'm calling bullshit.

 

Being able to spell requires little actual intelligence, if any at all. Its a memory test, nothing more. Arrange the 26 symbols in the same way they were first presented to you. No reasoning, deduction, or strategy is involved.

 

Most of high school requires little actual intelligence, if any at all. (Two can play this game.) In my experience, teachers who knocked the spelling bee were the ones who themselves couldn't spell very well, and got testy when their students called them on it, rather than appreciating the fact that at least one of the brats is awake and cares enough about the subject matter to catch the glaring error on the chalkboard. (It wasn't even me that always did the calling out.) Again, drawing on my experience, I don't think kids just sit down, crack open the ol' OED, and start memorizing. Generally, these competitions comprise children who started reading much earlier than the majority of their peers, and hence, have been reading above their level for several years, and are simply exposed to more vocabulary. If 5th graders can spell "aerodynamic," it's not because it was beaten into their brains, it's because they've encountered it and may even use it. It's hardly bullshit, though.

 

I did my share of bees in middle school. I won my school/district in 5th/6th/7th(97/98/99), won the regional in 5th, got to state in 5th but lost in the 10th round on "grandiloquence," having thought it was just a ramped-up "eloquence." Easy mistake, any 10-year-old could've made it. I won the school geography bee in 7th and 8th, qualified for state in 8th, and could've advanced to the finals with a perfect 20/20 had I not botched "from which continent did most Argentines arrive" and said Asia thinking of American Indians who crossed the Bering rather than Europe. I overshot it. So I finished at 19/20, forced a tiebreak, didn't know that The Gambia was the other African country besides Lesotho that only bordered one other country. (I said Orange Free State. WTF was I thinking?)

[Your Paragon of Virtue 0]

Spelling is not just memorization either. You have to learn about a bunch of different languages of origin in order to figure out where the word came from. Most of these words, the kids don't memorize, they take their knowledge of how letters would be arranged depending on what country it came from, or "style" it's in, and work off of that. There is deduction involved, every word the kids get they don't memorize, probably most actually.

 

And I hate the spelling bee, what a waste of time to have it on TV, and it's kind of lame to have it on national TV. The worst was when I saw it for like five minutes and they talked about certain contestants past experiences, like "last year they made this mistake, and they have been working hard to correct it....It's so sad to see him go, he was a great kid, etc." Jesus Christ.

[Guest Felonies!]

Yeah, like "ursprache" the other night. First time the pronouncer said it, I thought he just coughed up some phlegm. When it was clarified that it was German for a parent language, I was able to draw on the very small amount of German spelling and vocab I know to figure it out. I thought back to the prefix "ur-" which is roughly their equivalent to "proto-" and "sprache" meaning "speech" or "speaking" or something like that, with the "uh" sound at the end hinting that there was probably an e at the end. Those clarifications aren't just to buy time, you can actually piece it together with the clues when you don't know it. So yeah, bullshit

[naiwf 0]

Yeah, like "urspreche" the other night. First time the pronouncer said it, I thought he just coughed up some phlegm. When it was clarified that it was German for a parent language, I was able to draw on the very small amount of German spelling and vocab I know to figure it out. I thought back to the prefix "ur-" which is roughly their equivalent to "proto-" and "spreche" meaning "speech" or "speaking" or something like that, with the "uh" sound at the end hinting that there was probably an e at the end. Those clarifications aren't just to buy time, you can actually piece it together with the clues when you don't know it. So yeah, bullshit

 

It's ursprAche, and I memorized how sprache was spelled when I learned German for a while back in JHS.

[Guest Felonies!]

Acme anvil of irony right there, huh. I'm just gonna edit my post to save face. I can spell, but shit, I cannot tyype.

 

EDIT: see?

[SuperJerk 0]

Don't knock the spelling bee. I came so very close to making it to Washington in 8th grade. And won my school's bee 3 times. This kids are extremely smart, and puts in tons of time and effort to get as good as they do. And like we said, most of them end up very successful in life.

 

It's hardly memorizing the dictionary, either.

I'm calling bullshit.

 

Being able to spell requires little actual intelligence, if any at all. Its a memory test, nothing more. Arrange the 26 symbols in the same way they were first presented to you. No reasoning, deduction, or strategy is involved.

 

Most of high school requires little actual intelligence, if any at all. (Two can play this game.) In my experience, teachers who knocked the spelling bee were the ones who themselves couldn't spell very well, and got testy when their students called them on it, rather than appreciating the fact that at least one of the brats is awake and cares enough about the subject matter to catch the glaring error on the chalkboard. (It wasn't even me that always did the calling out.) Again, drawing on my experience, I don't think kids just sit down, crack open the ol' OED, and start memorizing. Generally, these competitions comprise children who started reading much earlier than the majority of their peers, and hence, have been reading above their level for several years, and are simply exposed to more vocabulary. If 5th graders can spell "aerodynamic," it's not because it was beaten into their brains, it's because they've encountered it and may even use it. It's hardly bullshit, though.

 

This post is merely you taking my argument and repeating it, except changing the subject. Nothing you are saying has any basis in either fact or reality. And I don't find you attempts to discredit my argument by attacking me personally to be either convincing or intellectually honest.

 

Spelling is not just memorization either. You have to learn about a bunch of different languages of origin in order to figure out where the word came from. Most of these words, the kids don't memorize, they take their knowledge of how letters would be arranged depending on what country it came from, or "style" it's in, and work off of that. There is deduction involved, every word the kids get they don't memorize, probably most actually.

 

I've never seen a spelling bee where a child was asked to give the language history of a word. And do these kids regularly use these words they learn to spell? Of course not. Quit being ridicules.

 

 

For those of you needing further proof, here's a copy of Bloom's Taxonomy. It was developed by Benjamin Bloom in the 1950s, and has been pretty much universally accepted ever since as a way of determining the different levels of learning.

 

 

The chart goes in order from easiest to hardest. Nothing about a spelling bee goes beyond the first (lowest) area, remembering.

[Guest Felonies!]

No, the child isn't asked to give the language of origin, the child asks the pronouncer. If you don't know a word, but you do know the word is derived from Greek, rather than Latin or Sanskrit, or you know which part of speech it is, you can use that to figure it out. There is more to it than just rote memorization.

 

And you know what, maybe they do use some of these words. They're bright kids, you know. I don't care where you place spelling bees in Bloom's Taxonomy, I can tell you that the field isn't just a bunch of drooling autistics. What's your take on the geography bee, then? Same thing?

 

I will agree that the ESPN/ABC coverage of the event is a farce, though.

[SuperJerk 0]

I don't care where you place spelling bees in Bloom's Taxonomy

 

If you actually knew what you were talking about you would.

[The Niggardly King 0]

Fuck Bloom's Taxonomy.... my algebra teacher back in the 9th grade used to always bring that shit up whenever I'd screw up horribly.

[Guest Felonies!]

I don't care where you place spelling bees in Bloom's Taxonomy

 

If you actually knew what you were talking about you would.

But you don't! It's not just "repeat the letters in the same order" like you said it was, because you don't always know the word, so you have to figure it out. I give up.