spelling bee and national senior spelling bee and tobie finzel and bill long and merriam webster collegiate dictionary

I am a speller. Indeed, I am a very good one. I have known this about myself from youth, but I never had either the encouragement or the motivation to pursue spelling bees as a kid. I was never "channeled" into it. Perhaps I wouldn't have had the motivation to do as well as I could; I know that my years from 10-13 were very busy ones, with newspaper routes, magazine routes, school, church, sports, and a variety of other kids things. But I also think that my "specialness" wasn't really discovered by my teachers or parents because I was causing so many other problems for them (you can read all about it in my 2004 autobiography).

But I have never lost my inclination or interest in spelling. So, I was delighted to discover last year, while walking through Aurora, OR, that there was such a thing as a state senior spelling bee ("SSB") for people over 50. The national bee, sponsored by the Wyoming AARP, is now in its tenth year, and they plan to make some kind of special effort to draw people to the event in Cheyenne on June 18 this year. I think the interest in this activity will grow over time as more and more people over 50 are concerned to keep mentally fit.

2004 Performance

So, I participated in the 2004 contest in Oregon and got second. Well, that isn't as good as it sounds, even though someone from Oregon often places in the top two or three places in Cheyenne, and Oregon residents have won it on three or four occasions since its inception in 1996. There were only five of us, so getting second is nothing necessarily to crow about. But I enjoyed the experience immensely, and had the strange but delightful experience of having three or four people eagerly consult the dictionary with me after the contest just to see how something was spelled. It was as if our lives tumbled out to each other as we were looking up dieffenbachia or whatever the word was.

I got second in the Oregon competition. Tobie Finzel won it, and she then got third in the nationals. Tobie had also placed third in the 2003 nationals. But I didn't study for the Oregon competition, since I learned of it only days before it took place. I took some time in the summer of 2004 to study for the national competition (which took place in September 2004) and, surprise, surprise, managed to get second. I lost out to a truly great speller, Dr. Jeffrey Kirsch, a professor of Spanish/Portuguese at U of WI Madison, and a successful competitor in the "kids bee" in 1965. Jeff not only knows romance langugages "cold," but has dipped into classical languages and also knows Japanese. Though I have studied 11 languages in my day, I don't know the romance languages as well as Jeff, though my classical learning is pretty good. In any case, Jeff was a real tiger in 2004, mowing down the competition with skill and strength. We were both exhausted after the oral rounds ended in Cheyenne, though he easily beat me.

2005

So, now we are in 2005 and the competitions have come again. The rule is that if you win at the state or nationals you are ineligible for such a competition in ensuing years. I think that probably is not a good rule because, unlike the kids, a "senior" adult may still have decades of life and lucidity left, and continuing competition may be the best thing for a victor. Yet, there might be the tendency of one person to just keep winning, sort of like a "Shaq of spelling," who devastates the competition each year, and that wouldn't be too much fun for everyone else. So, I guess I will live with the rule.

But the Oregon competition is coming up on Saturday, April 9. I am not really "ready" for Oregon this year, again, because my teaching and writing schedule has not given me much study time. I hope to to well enough on Saturday. The national competition is open to anyone, so even if I blow it big time I can go to Cheyenne. Yet, only the winner gets a $300 check to help him/her with expenses to to the nationals. I would like to get that, of course.

Plans for Cheyenne

But here is my secret plan to win the nationals this year. I want to share it here so that you will know that when it happens, I PLANNED for it all along! To understand what I am planning to do, you need to know that the dictionary from which the words are taken is 1460 pages long (Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition) and there are about 57 days between my last day of teaching for the semester (April 22) and the date of competition (June 18). Here is what I am planning to do.

I have divided the dictionary into 57 units of 26 pages each. Each day, beginning April 22, if things work out as planned, I plan to "study" 26 pages. I will not necessarily just go 1-26 on day 1 and 27-52 on day 2, etc., but I will pick out a 26-page block of pages to study for the day. I have already experimented with a few four-page blocks in preparation for the Oregon bee, and it takes me about 10 minutes to work through 4 pages. I am fortunate, for example, that in studying today's pages (pp.810-813), I ran into the word "move" and "much" and "most" and words derived from those words. It sure makes it easy when 1/3 of a column is devoted to telling you the various meanings of move! But, in any case, I think that I ought to be able to get by with 1-2 hours a day of study beginning April 22. I make lists of the words I don't know or I might not know, and then I write a short definition of the word and make sure I know it. Then, I plan to write a column a day and call it "A Speller's Diary," or something like that, with my first column to appear on April 22. Thus, when I win, and the Cheyenne newspaper reporter asks me "How did you do it?" all I need do is to point to my web diary and then she knows exactly what I did.

Conclusion

Why am I doing this? Pure and simple. I want to win. For so many years in my adult life I lived as if competition was a bad thing. I think it was a residual effect of my imbibing too much liberal theology of the 1970s and a certain kind of screwed-up feminism which held that if a man asserted himself it was always bad for women. But now I have shed those hangups, and I want to compete and win. Simple as that. But, I want to make sure I win. Thus, the discipline of working through the dictionary every day.

The reason I selected this method of operating is that the dictionary that we use is a fairly limited one. It is "finite," as I like to say. Well, the unabridged is finite, but it would be a REAL task to master that. This seems eminently doable and, because I will be able to write about my experience and maybe even write a few word-essays as a result, it should be fun. Maybe in future years if they see how I "cracked the code," they will have to graduate to a more difficult dictionary. But, that is their problem, and I have enough of my own to worry about. Thus, look for my diary beginning April 22. It will be both a witness to my drive and my inutility.