Untitled and Undecided

8:42am - The national spelling bee is underway. CNN showed a few of the participants this morning. I heard on sports talk radio that this year ESPN will not be showing the Bee. Rather, it’s broadcast partner ABC will be showing it to cable and non-cable audiences alike this weekend. This comes in the wake of a Hollywood movie, Akeelah and the Bee, and the successful documentary Spellbound from 2001. Kids competing against each other in national competition to spell words is now a Big Deal. I am ambivalent about the Spelling Bee.

I like the idea of national attention on smart kids and on academics. But, I wonder if that’s what we are really getting with the national coverage. Does anyone care about the intellectual aspect of the Bee? Or do we just care about the event as a sporting event? Does this motivate kids around the world to do better in school? Do kids look at these other kids as heroes to be emulated as they do our sports stars? Or is this mainly entertainment for adults? I don’t know enough about the Bee to be to critical. I just wonder.

Last week, a New York Times column about the National Geography Bee caught my eye. I had never heard of the National Geography Bee. In it, Charles Passy (a staffwriter from the Palm Beach Post and parent of a participant at the regional level of the Geography Bee), makes a compelling argument that the National Geography Bee should receive more attention than it does, and that it is actually a better competition, from a learning point of view, than the spelling bee. Not only does the Geography Bee teach us “about the world we live” (the implication being that this is a better outcome than knowing how to spell words), but that “the bee itself requires a different method of preparation.” In other words, the process of preparing for the Geography Bee is a qualitatively better learning experience than the process of preparing for the Spelling Bee. Here’s are his reasons:

Spelling Bee contestants get a word list. Geography Bee contestants must fend for themselves. “They must be more creative and resourceful, relying on a combination of atlases, almanacs and publications. They also usually become voracious newspaper readers…”

The questions “require different levels of thinking.” It’s goes beyond “memorization or etymology.” There is some memorization involved, but you also have to know about the relationships between nations, cultures, and people and their environment. The questions can come in a wide variety of forms.

Passy concludes with this explicit comparison between the two bees:

True, spelling is a gateway to understanding language, but what possible value is there to knowing how to spell “appoggiatura” (a musical embellishment) and “pococurante” (an indifferent person), to name two of the more recent winning words? By contrast, knowing about Cuba or Russia means knowing about Communism, the political ideology that has informed much of America’s foreign policy in the past half-century.

And yet the spelling bee continues to receive all the attention. Perhaps that’s because spelling is a tantalizingly easy concept to grasp. You either spell a word right or you don’t. The answers are all in the dictionary.

Geography, on the other hand, asks more. But it offers more in return: to know the world is to know how to make it a better place, from a path to peace in war-torn regions to a promise to conserve our planet’s natural resources.

I don’t know if I buy that all participants at every level can get out of the Geography Bee what the author is claiming is possible, but I guess there is something compelling about this vision for the importance of a Bee about something a bit more socially, culturally, and politically relevant than just spelling words.

The author’s point, though, aligns itself with a column in today’s New York Times by Emily Stagg, a three time finalist in the Spelling Bee. In her column, she argues for adding for other aspects to the Spelling competition. In her words, the Spelling Bee no longer emphasizes the right “real world skills.” An alternative, she proposes, is a “Definitions Bee.”

I am also not sure I agree that the Spelling Bee is more popular simply because it’s “easier to grasp.” Rather, I am guessing that it has to do with the fact that ESPN started making a big deal about it in the early 1990s, just as the National Geography Bee was getting underway, and that the Spelling Bee has been going on for a long time (78 years). Anyone who went to school in this country participated at some level (perhaps just in their home room).

Two days after I read the column about the Geography Bee, I happened to catch the last round on PBS (Alex Trebek of Jeopardy was the host). I was amazed by range of questions. I only knew a couple of the questions that I saw asked. I liked the fact that participants could miss once and still have a shot at winning. I was also intrigued that the handful of participants I saw competing at the end were all of south-asian descent, probably first generation Americans if not immigrants themselves. By the time I saw the top finishers awarded their scholarship checks, I was all ready to sing the praises of the Geography Bee as vociferously as the author of that column.

But, then I read the following from a letter to the New York Times:

I agree with Mr. Passy that the National Geographic Geography Bee beats a spelling bee any day and that we need more global learning.

But the Geography Bee is not the way to do it. As a former teacher who administered the bee for four years, I would vote to abolish it completely.

First, the learning Mr. Passy highlights should be part of real history curriculums, not outside preparation for a one-day event. Second, recognizing Kola Peninsula in Russia actually says nothing about a student’s ability to recognize Stalinism or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Finally, and most important, all this ultracompetitive bee did for my students — fourth and fifth graders — was make one kid happy and the rest either indifferent or on the verge of tears.

While the Geography Bee still seems better in many ways than the Spelling Bee, what I hadn’t considered very carefully is that it is still an intense competition. In fact, if it were to somehow eclipse the Spelling Bee it would still be 11-13 year-olds on national television under the spotlight competing to win.

I remember when I was a kid and participated in the spelling bee in my class room, school, and in my district. There was a time that I could remember which word knocked me out every year. I remember when ESPN2 started showing the spelling bee on TV. I found myself unable to watch these kids struggling to get through each letter and each word, under what seemed to be an incredible amount of pressure. A few years earlier, I had felt the pressure when I choked on a word as one of the last remaining in my district. I can’t imagine what I would have felt if I knew that people could be watching me on TV.

But, i know people who love when ESPN shows the spelling bee (and the highlights on Sportscenter). They find it thoroughly entertaining. I understand why. It’s a sport. You marvel at the ability of people much younger than you to memorize some words and decipher others based on their etymologies, definitions, and how they are used in a sentence. It takes intelligence, commitment, and dedication to do well. It’s heartbreaking when a charming kid fails. It’s aggravating and exciting when a kid who seems “a little too sure of him/herself” does well. At the same moment when you are marveling at the abilities of kids, you find yourself forgetting that they are just kids, not professional athletes, who get paid to be in the spotlight and to entertain the nation.

Both Bees emphasize and reinforce an assumption that is a big part of the American education system: “learning” and “competition” go hand in hand. Not every teacher, student, or administrator may believe this, but it seems to be a part of our culture. Why is this? What alternatives are there? Can we make knowledge of etymology, geography, and international culture important without resorting to the public spectacle of sports?