Yes, it's a dictionary that weighs about as much as he does.
Secondly, he wanted to win this:
Yes, a year's supply of Price's Ice Cream.
Yeah, the trip to Washington, D.C., would have been nice, too, I suppose. He studied the list of thousands of words for hours a day. Seriously. He was R E A D Y. The first round of competition began. Well, actually it was a practice round. 85ish spellers (half had already gone the day before) were sitting on stage and each took their turn with the mic, telling their name and school and spelling a practice word that could not get them eliminated.
Brishen got this word: kona
No problem. It was a list word, as they all were. He knew it.
We were already almost an hour into the bee and we still had not gotten around to an elimination round. We could tell, however, that there would be a lot of eliminating happening in that first round, and we were right. Over half of the kids were eliminated in the first round. Some were the cutest little elementary school kids you ever did see. There are times when being a super tall 8th grader makes you stand out a bit. This was one of them.
Brishen got his word: flotilla
No problem. It was a list word, as they all were. He knew it.
We sat through all the appeals, where parents try to get the judges to reinstate their precious offspring. I know there are occasions for valid appeals, but, mostly, the appeals were a little desperate. Each time, though, we had to listen to the entire audio of that contestant's turn, to see if poor Johnny or Jane had been fooled by the announcer to spell the word wrong. That took quite a while in between each round, and, invariably, the child who was reinstated was eliminated the very next round. I'm told the exact same thing happens at nationals.
Round two finally began, with less than half of the kids remaining.
Brishen got his word: camphor
No problem. It was a list word, as they all were. He knew it.
At that point, only 17 children remained. It was time to take a break for lunch. Those 17 children would come back in the afternoon to join with the remaining kids from the first day of competition for The Finals. Cue drum roll.
The first word of the final competition was asked. I didn't remember it from our list. Hmm. Word after word was asked. They didn't sound like ones I had recently asked Brishen. Hmm. Mind you, he studied this HUGE list of really tough words for months. I thought that maybe they were words that Jon had asked him. All of them? I studied Brishen's face to see if there was panic. I didn't detect any. By the time the first row had been asked their words, there was no denying the truth...
These were not list words!! They went off-list!! We studied for months, and they already went off-list with 40ish contestants remaining and in the very first round of the final competition. What?!?! Brishen had been off-list before after going round after round with one other competitor in our local bee. It was decided that they both obviously knew the list, so it was time to venture off the list. That made perfect sense. This? No sense at all. I continued to breathe and pray that he would somehow get a word that he would know.
Brishen got his word: pronouncement
No problem. It was not a list word, but it wasn't too tough. He knew it.
They gave a break after the first round of finals competition. Only 16 kids remained in the competition. Those kids left the stage and rushed to their parents. There was only one topic of conversation in that room. THEY ARE OFF LIST!!!! Parents were outraged. We all had given so much of our time and effort to help our kids learn the list, and a huge chunk of the kids were out the very first round because they were given words completely off that list. Those poor organizers and judges! Wow!
They addressed the concerns of the most vocal parents (and listened to lots more appeals) and finally took the stage to explain one thing: the goal of this spelling bee was to find the very best speller to represent us in Washington, D.C. Every single child faced words off the list. The previous year they stayed on the list for 40 rounds with three spellers. In the end, it may have been the best speller who won or it may have been the one who had the best endurance. This year, they did not want to repeat that mistake. When you compete at Nationals, the dictionary is your list. The giant dictionary.
I understood. I did. I really did wish they would have given us two or three rounds of list words, so we could all see the fruits of our labor, so we could pat ourselves on the back for all that work we had done with our spellers. All the parents wanted the same. But they were actually right. They had to keep it fair and find the best speller. Things would certainly happen more quickly this way. At this point I just reassured Brishen that he had lots of off-list experience under his belt from the previous bee, he reads a lot, he studied lots of language origin rules, he has studied Latin for years, and on and on. In the end, he knows what he knows, and there was nothing more we could do.
Brishen got his final word: feliform
Shoot. None of us had ever heard that word.
Shoot. It had that dumb schwa sound in the middle.
Shoot. It could be an i or an e in the beginning.
I could tell that Brishen was not confident. He slowed down enough to ask the language of origin and the definition. When he heard it was Latin, he thought instantly of "feles" as the proper word for "cat" and went right to spelling instead of asking more questions or thinking of "feline." In the end he spelled it in a fairly educated way, with two e's, but that bell did toll. He was out. His Latin training let him know that it was not the similar-sounding word, "filaform," but it still led him astray.
Shoot. He was upset, but, the reality was that there were a ton of hard words out there. At the end of that round, only 7 contestants remained. That means that he tied for 8th--out of all the kids in El Paso and Southern New Mexico, not to mention the 168 kids who made it all the way to the Regional Bee. That is nothing to be upset about. He could have gone for days spelling the list words correctly, but we were honest enough with ourselves to know that if he got "feliform" right, he likely would have missed the next word or the next word or the next word.
There were two kids who battled several rounds for the overall title and the spoils. Those two kids definitely deserved it! Spelling is definitely something they are better at than Brishen is or I am or almost anyone else in that room. Whether they went off-list right away or let us have a few rounds of satisfaction for a job well-done, the end result was still the same. The best speller won. I'm sad it wasn't Brishen, but, quite honestly, we are both a little glad that he didn't have to lug that big dictionary home and immediately start having to learn all the words in it. He will definitely have a lot more free time this way!
1 comment:
Major bummer that he didn't win. But, he did such an excellent job anyway! You should still get him that year's supply of ice cream. I'll help him eat it. ;)
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