When I competed in the 1998 National Spelling Bee, it was really cool if you made it to the second day of competition because it meant you got an extra Scripps (then Scripps Howard) polo shirt, and you had a decent chance of making it to the televised rounds on ESPN. I was happy enough just to make it to Day 2. I never realized that studying a few hours a day meant that I’d make it onto ESPN or, moreover, a fourth-place finish. A handful of kids had goals of making it into the top 10. Just a handful. I made it, and hadn’t planned on it.
Fast forward eight years. Reaching the ESPN rounds just isn’t cool enough for many of these kids. At least 20 spellers have their sights set straight on the trophy and nothing less in a competition dominated by luck. Five said they read the dictionary cover to cover. I’m pretty sure all five made it to ABC’s televised rounds in prime time.
Some say the documentary “Spellbound” contributed to these kids studying day in, day out with their sights set on winning, but the kids in “Spellbound” didn’t study from the dictionary. How do I know? Because I was (and still am) good friends with six of the eight students featured in the documentary, and not one read the dictionary cover to cover (and not one claimed to do so, either).
So what’s going on now? Well, the Internet has become a study tool. Back when I was in the competition, Merriam-Webster’s Third New International Unabridged Dictionary (the official source for bee words) wasn’t available on CD like it is now. Having the dictionary on CD is a powerful etymological tool. I do wish I had it then, but at the same time, I’m glad I went into my final spelling bee with humble hopes, because I still relish the experience today.
But the media have grabbed onto — almost leeched onto — the spelling bee when Bee Week rolls around each year. Granted, a bevy of reporters come to support the kids from their respective newspapers, but one set of reporters that certainly didn’t interview me back in 1998 was bloggers.
So you can imagine my shock when I learned that according to Technorati and quoted in David Sifry’s State of the Blogosphere for August 2006, the National Spelling Bee could have been considered a big event in the blogosphere. There’s this strange cult phenomenon that exists around the bee; a bunch of spellers (including myself) are “Facebooked” all the time by complete strangers, who say they watched us spell with poise on ESPN several years back. So I do understand that a lot of people watch the bee, consider it a sport, consider it not a sport, etc. But until recently, the bee was really shared among family and friends. Now, in part due to the higher difficulty of words and more of an international presence (spellers from New Zealand and Canada competed last year for the first time, and Finola Hackett of Alberta placed second this year), the bee is an event that requires breaking news coverage in addition to the feature stories about the number of homeschooled students participating each year — and that’s where bloggers from all over the world fill in the blanks during Bee Week.
