The spelling bee ran out of words
The kids outlasted the testers, and eight winners were left standing:
Eight spellers were better than the dictionary. They were better than anything the Scripps National Spelling Bee could throw at them. And they all ended up with a hand on the trophy.
In the most extraordinary ending in the 94-year history of the competition, the bee ended in an eight-way tie on Thursday night. The eight co-champions spelled the final 47 words correctly, going through five consecutive perfect rounds.
Each will get the full winner’s prize of $50,000 in cash.
I’m glad they didn’t split the winner’s purse eight ways.
I watched the last half-hour or so of the bee. These kids are trained to near-perfection—maybe to perfection—in their chosen field. It’s a pursuit I don’t pretend to understand, but it seems to interest them. Yes, parents are pushing them, too, but from watching them it seems to me that these children are also strongly self-motivated.
Spelling bees appeal to a certain kind of OCD character. In recent years the winners have tended to be of Indian (Asian) descent, and in fact they dominate the competition. It’s no accident. Here’s an article that gives some of the backstory on that:
Indian Americans have won every Scripps National Spelling Bee since 2008…
Such deep involvement in a language arts activity may seem unusual for an immigrant community known for its prowess in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). But I learned there is community prestige in placing competitively in spelling bees and great familial pride for having participated in something so challenging at a young age.
Champions often are groomed on the spelling bee circuit. Nearly every Indian American speller who has won the National Spelling Bee over the last decade has also won or done well in the South Asian Spelling Bee, founded in 2008 and run by a public relations firm…
Competing in bees also allows these young word nerds to make a vast social network of friends who also love spelling. For them, smart is definitely the new cool…
Through Indian American community involvement and word of mouth come more potential bee entrants. Many parents of Indian American spellers I met — including Dasari and his wife, Usha — earned STEM degrees in India that made them attractive to U.S. employers. They immigrated as part of the skilled migration solicited through the Immigration Act of 1990.
When their children aged out of the spelling bee competition in 2017, the Dasaris founded “SpellPundit,” a coaching company. It joins more established Indian American coaching enterprises, including “GeoSpell,” started by Dallas-area resident Vijay Reddy. When their son, Chetan, competed, Reddy and his wife programmed software and created extensive word lists for him. Chetan’s best national bee finish was seventh place. “We wanted him to win,” Reddy said. “It was our Olympics.”…
Kevin Negandhi, a former host of the broadcast, has said the bee fondly reminds him of his Indian American childhood, where education and homework were emphasized.
He sums up Indian American interest in the bee this way: “We know it is our night, and it is a night of pride.”
The words have had to get more and more difficult over the years. But nothing was too difficult last night for the eight well-deserved winners.
Here they are:
Now that’s assimilation!
Note there is not a Latinx in the bunch.
But they might Americanize their given names. “Shruthika”? “Abhijay”? That’s enough to give unwed black mommas ideas.
I won two spelling bees when I was young. I’m of Norwegian descent, back through both mother and father, like Magnus Carlson, the World Chess Champion for six years now. He took the title from Vishi Anand.
It’s a shame that the rest of their “education” is going to colonize their minds.
one token european amidst 8 Indo-aryans
Wow, that’s wonderful. How fascinating that Indian-Americans have taken over. I think I’ve posted here before that I made it into the final regional rounds of the Scripps-Howard bee, though never quite to Nationals, long, long ago, twice, in seventh and eighth grades. I guess it says something about just how nerdy a child I was that I remember those bees as So Absolutely Exciting. And I highly valued the two blue Papermate ballpoint pens that I got as prizes. My Waterloos were toxolophile and unconscionable. I don’t believe I’ve ever written the word toxolophile in the decades since then, but every time I write the word unconscionable, I feel a certain gentle bitterness and regret.
I had many interests as a very young kid, but my first Success was in pursuing Band, and taking clarinet. Then we moved and there was no music in 6th grade. 7th grade had only Orchestra, so I took it, grudgingly. Tough to face up to – but it was even greater – and more Successful – than Band.
Also in 7th grade, Shop Class. Well-off Western timber-endowment local school. Post-WWII Pacific Northwest, heavily fortified & dug-in, steeled for the inevitable Japanese Invasion. About 17 years on; skylights still opaquely blacked-out.
Shop Class was Amazing. Like in the 1920s, when Boy Scouts scaled dozens of peaks in a weeks-long expedition through the future Olympic National Park.
So in Shop there also came Career Counseling. I’m building a Super Sonic Transport model (Boeing SST), acing Electronics, operating grownup-machines, optical instruments. Mom & new Stepdad gave me a microscope, I still have. And lovin’ my hour in Orchestra, practicing violin evenings and in 2nd chair only because #1 is a long-time member.
The teacher goes over my coming 8th grade Electives options. There’s a big Wye in the road ahead. It’s end-days for beloved music class.
Next year I’m cruising through algebra, geometry and a general Science class. We mix powdered zinc and powdered sulfur in a mortar, and ignite it with a little magnesium ribbon (flare). It’s solid rocket fuel. A blast of brilliant incandescence, a mushroom cloud of dense smoke boiling across the ceiling. “OK!” Window-monitors pull open all the windows. Door-monitor swings wide the door and we all march out into the hall. There is not a bored soul to be found. WOW!!!
We’re covering the Atom, and Molecules. There seems to be some gaposis in my text-book, and – unusually – the teacher seems not to respond effectively to my questions. One day, maybe we took a quiz and I’ve finished and am quietly reading. Suddenly the teacher is at my elbow, holding a book out to me: “Nuclear Physics – A Course in Programmed Instruction”. Success, again, in a more open-ended field.
Programmed Instruction breaks a topic down into tiny-steps, and each is always easy to get right. It uses ‘frames’, like flashcards in book-format. Iirc, it was developed before the infamous BF Skinner promoted it, but it took a beating even for the 2nd-hand connnection.
Is this really a cold, calculating, inhuman way to learn? Well, having also learned to play clarinet & violin, and more importantly to be part of a music-making Band and Orchestra … it is not one wit different from how we learn a musical instrument. Teeny-tiny steps, with the added agony of infinite repetition!
Given the right environment, and the right materials, I’ll testify that learning can proceed at rates that elicit protestations of something extraordinary afoot. I think in days of olde, we simply over-estimated the challenge of learning to spell with perfection, and underestimated the effects of better learning-tools.
I went on to take introductory Classical languages, in addition to the usual Modern standards … and I’ve recently started picking it up again … it’s easy on the Internet, and I’ve repeatedly noticed, “This isn’t as hard as we used to make it out to be”. I suspect an historic Event is near at hand, in the field of language-learning, as acquiring multiple languages becomes common, even at-age. Which yeah-huh, is closely linked to mass-perfection at the National Spelling Bee.
I’m also pricing clarinets.
I’d imagine that this crew would be deadly at Scrabble. Any one of them could make a career out of it
Reminds me of a joke.
Judge: OK Your word is “seaward”
10 year old: errr C. U. N……
Judge: Stop! Stop! Just please stop!!
They are just remembering how the words were spelled from their previous times.
There is a documentary, Spellbound, below, about the spelling bee, and a movie, Akeelah and the Bee. Both are good ones. Akeelah gets into the preparation that takes place for the kids to learn all those words.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0334405/?ref_=nv_sr_3?ref_=nv_sr_3
Similar was true of the test for the sciences schools in ny..
brutal… 3 schools, only about 1200 seats in all…
puts you in an interesting place in terms of stats and base IQ
[average at the school is 145]
means nothing now…
talent is white supremacy
so is merit
they will change the entrance because they need to add more (ie. control the population) people of preferred pigmentation and/or pudenda
As a seventh grader, my son made it to the state championships in the National Geographic Geography Bee. I noticed that a very high percentage of the contestants were Indian American (we are not). Later, when I was recapping our experience at a family gathering, I commented (in a completely neutral manner) that the geo bee was dominated by Indian Americans. My leftie sister insinuated that it was racist to even mention it! I honestly don’t see why, it’s an interesting phenomenon. And if a cultural trait, it’s an admirable one.
It’s always interesting that minorities like Indian and Asian Americans excel at scholastic activities when compared to other minorities, specifically black and Hispanics. The first two tend to be from immigrant families that aren’t all too big being “woke” or too self-involved in hyper individualism.
Ain’t America great! (Again!?) – South Asian – Americans winning a spelling bee. (Mostly)
I’m pretty sure better computer training is helping those with a talent for remembering spelling, to remember more words, more accurately.
(Spell-check has been terrible for my own personal spelling, tho good for the output).
Reminds me that there is a group of Nigerians who do very well at Scrabble — focusing on the 4 & 5 letter words. I’m actually a bit more impressed with great Scrabble play.
There are two classes of Indian-American physicians: A+ and C-. No B’s. In my experience in both academic and non-academic settings.
“There are two classes of Indian-American physicians: A+ and C-. No B’s. In my experience in both academic and non-academic settings.”
No wonder, really. There are two classes of Indians: high-caste Brahmins, and everybody else. For millenia they were mating only within their own castes, and originally the Brahmins were of a different origin than the native population of the subcontinent. After conquering India, they self-appointed themselves as highest varna (caste). So even genetically they are the different people (Arians).
“there is a group of Nigerians who do very well at Scrabble”. My guess is that they all belong to Ibdo ethnic group – a distinctive ethnicity with a very high IQ, on par with Ashkenazi Jews (median score at 110), while average black Africans have it at 85. They also do very well at any intellectual competition and in academic achievement.
Correction: Igbo. And Nigerian population is even worse in its intellectual development than an average black African, at median IQ score 69. This corresponds to 11 years old European at development indexes.