In It to Win It: The National Spelling Bee

In It to Win It: The National Spelling Bee

The annual National Spelling Bee has received serious media attention over the past decade, even inspiring two Hollywood films: Akeelah and the Bee and Spellbound. Just yesterday, in the weekly e-mail Amsco receives from the National Council of Teachers of English, I was reading about a book written by James Maguire on the national spelling bee. The book is titled The American Bee: The National Spelling Bee and the Culture of Word Nerds.

In an interview with the NCTE's Voices from the Middle, Maguire shares some captivating facts gathered during the research for his book. For starters, he talked about why the contest is called a spelling bee. It seems the word bee represents a type of social activity in America, a coming together of a group to achieve a purpose. Maguire talks about barn-raising bees and quilting bees as American traditions, and he says that the annual spelling bee falls into this category of gathering. The gathering for the contest is among young experts in language arts and word meanings.

Aspirants to the national contest begin competing at the local level with a list called the Paideia, which is published by the Scripps-Howard Foundation, the organizers of the National Spelling Bee. The Paideia contains about 3,800 words. If students get past the local level and are entered as contestants in the national bee, they are given a list called the Consolidated Word List--23,000 words long! The lists are available for download, free of charge.

Once students arrive in D.C., students take a 25-word written test, which eliminates about two-thirds of them from the contest. The written test is combined with a session in which each student has to spell at least one word on stage. The Scripps-Howard Foundation does this so that each student can feel as if he or she participated in the celebrity of the National Spelling Bee, even if he or she is eliminated in the first round.

Maguire says that the sense of celebrity in the contest is a major motivation for some students who compete. He has quoted a student as saying, “I want the fame. I want the money.” And quite a bit of money it is! Winners receive a package of prizes that form a combined value of about $40,000. Aside from this comes the serious clout of putting “Winner: National Spelling Bee” on a college application. Past winners have gone on to become astrophysicists in NASA’s jet propulsion lab and professors at Harvard University.

The spellers are not the only ones who get caught up in the excitement of the competition. Each year, the National Spelling Bee is broadcast on ESPN. This past year, it was broadcast on ABC, a network television channel, and ratings showed that it drew an audience of 10 million people. Get ready for this year's bee, which will be broadcast on a combination of ESPN and ABC, as it was last year. The fireworks start next Thursday, June 3.