I have a confession to make. Your content writer is a spelling bee geek. When I was a child, my father would hold spelling bees with my sister and I, and well, I always won. Not to brag, but really to show the benefits of phonetics. My older sister did not go to kindergarten (I have no memory of why), but kindergarten is where phonetics were taught in the 1960s. I was taught to sound the words out and that there, my friends, was my secret weapon.
I still remember 4th grade and Mrs. Stephens. I didn’t like her before the spelling bee and I liked her less afterwards. I don’t think she liked me much either. I spelled the word correctly and she called it incorrect. I tried to be polite and insist that I did indeed say exactly what her favorite student said next and she declared correct, but it fell on deaf ears. Yes, I am still bitter.
When I found this story on the state spelling bee in Hawaii, I had to share. “Bust Out the Dictionary — It’s Spelling Bee Time,” shares the process and how the ultimate state winner will go to the 87th annual Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington D.C. Good luck to all the participants and may there be no Mrs. Stephens in the judges.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
Alice – I admire you pursuing your truth with that nun. And kudos to your mom for supporting you.
Ashleigh, I am glad you found your passion through spelling. It is funny how we are led to things in life. I would be the first to agree that English has so many outliers that it is a challenge, but I will always be a spelling bee geek, and I will always be a little bitter about Mrs. Stephens.
Ashleigh and Melody, it’s not just phonetics–the sound sense–but also a good visual sense and memory of words, which comes primarily from reading. People who don’t ever see words in print will never be good spellers (assuming the printed instance is spelled correctly, an increasingly unreliable assumption).
I feel your pain with Mrs. Stephens. In 4th grade where we were tested on words with certain prefixes, I offered “interfacing,” a word well known to sewers but not so much to nuns. I had to get a note from my mom, from whom I learned the word, to convince the teacher it was valid.
I would disagree Melody. I also learned to spell phonetically but American English is not a phonetic language so most of my spelling bee’s were an utter failure. A good example is the silent “e” and words that are borrowed like “depot.” Phonetically I would always spell defence instead of defense. After learning I couldn’t rely on how things sounded I started to do better and this, in part, lead me to become interested in linguistics.