Jan 21 2009
(Not So Much) Wordless Wednesday - Spelling Bee Champ
And the winner is…
Sometime this morning my ten-year-old daughter won her school spelling bee. I was sitting in the front row of her school cafetorium on pins and needles as she and the other remaining student duked it out for five rounds. My daughter won out in the end with the word “percolate”.
Late last night was when we finally got around to reviewing her word list. As we went about tidying up, I quizzed her verbally. For the most part she did alright, although she did get hung up on certain words. “Innate” with one “n” instead of 2. “Exhilarate” without the “h”. At some point today, I knew her success would not only rest on her powers of recall but on the luck of the draw as well. For example, getting the word “lucid” over “colloquial”. You should have seen the poor kid who had to spell “colloquial”, the most he could muster was a series of squeaks and a final letter of “o” before finally creeping back to his seat.
“Percolate” in the grand scheme of things, was not a bad option. It’s spelled like it sounds, right?
Except when the teacher reading out the spelling words pronounces it “per-coo-late”. Percoolate? Really? This is an educator we’re talking about, with a better than average grasp of the English language. I assume. I might be mistaken.
Perhaps it was the slight shake in my head that tipped my daughter off. The look that said, “That’s not right.” Or maybe she remembered reading it or spelling it before. Either way, she called out the correct letters in the correct sequence and was proclaimed the winner.
Woo to the hoo. I really had to restrain myself from doing a victory dance, and not just because of my long dissolved dreams of being a spelling bee champion myself.
Now we’ve been instructed to study the Scripps booklet because she’ll be moving on in a month or so to the countywide bee, which includes words like “mukhtar”, “nachtmusik”, and “voortrekker”.
Makes “colloquial” kind of seem like a walk in the park, doesn’t it?
