The Bathtub: Too Much Information: The Five Ps of Bees

For a bunch of American 5th-8th graders and their families, this was already Bee Week before The Bathtub had anything to say about it. 258 kids--most of them even nerdier than Justin Douglas--have descended on our nation's capital for the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which starts tomorrow and, after five grueling rounds, concludes Thursday night in a live, televised championship round on ABC from 8-10 p.m.

That's right--prime time, baby. And these kids deserve it.

If you've ever caught the bee on TV before, or if you've seen the fantastic documentary Spellbound, then you don't need me to convince you that Thursday's finals are worth watching. You already know. I'll be watching too, with the nostalgic perspective of a former competitor who still cringes at the ding of a bell. I never made it big time (in retrospect, I was just a bit too well-adjusted), though there were fewer rounds than you could count on your fingers separating me from the Scripps stage at one point. So I know these kids and how they tick. And I know the edge that separated me from the winners. After the jump, I'll tell you the five qualities that turn a good speller into a champ.

[Cue Eminem's "Lose Yourself."*]

The 5 Ps of Spelling Bee Excellence

Preparation. Nobody gets to the national bee by accident. Your average speller has already won his class bee, his school bee, his county bee, and his regional bee. Sure, there's luck involved, as any bee contestant who's wiped his brow in relief as the kid before him goes down on a word he had no idea how to spell either will tell you. But the luck here is not about getting thrown "cat" instead of "Ursprache." It's about getting thrown "xanthosis" when the last page of words you studied before going onstage were your medical prefixes--it's lucky, but it's still hard. And it still required you to work in advance.

Practice. This is probably the same as preparation, but its important enough to merit double mention. I can still remember overhearing other kids at the continental breakfast buffet before the 1994 Washington Post bee as they talked about their practice habits. I wasn't the coolest kid, but even I had better things to be doing than "going through a stack of 5,000 flashcards, and then removing ones from the stack if I spelled them right, then cycling through again until there were none left, and then starting over." Say WHAT?!

Parents. Interestingly, if you look at the list of winning words since the bee started, you might be surprised to see how many are words you know. The level of difficulty has gone gradually up over time and has really spiked in the past decade--the 1984 kid won on "luge," for crying out loud. So what's the difference between why it only took "knack" to win in 1932, but "appoggitura" in 2005? I'll tell you: parents. They pushed the competition to a whole new level when they started hiring tutors and signing their kids up for personalized Latin classes.

My parents' own motto was always "study enough so that you don't embarrass yourself when you get up there," because they thought that it would be a positive experience for me to look back on as long as I didn't make some nervous idiot mistake in the first round and regret it. They were also fond of saying things like, "we're proud of you no matter what," and, "you have to keep in mind that a lot of those kids up there have nothing else in their life but this kind of thing." Needless to say, I didn't stand a chance against the kids whose parents put the weight of the world on their shoulders. I was wayyyyy too relaxed.

Proutine. By which I of course mean "routine," but with a P. A good routine is essential in spelling. This is a concept that was touched on in Akeelah and the Bee and it is very true. (It's not just a spelling bee thing, though--ask any basketball player how he does his free throws, for example.) Some kids close their eyes and mumble, some ask the judges questions in a precise order; others repeat the word over and over again, stressing different syllables each time. Still others pretend to write the word on their card or in the air with their fingers, and others have no apparent strategy but to kind of scream and breathe really heavy.

These routines are necessary to help spellers block out the crowd and the lights and the pressure and snap into the spelling mindset. Years later, they can also be retroactively recognized as the early signs of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

Perspective. That is, a lack thereof. The reason young kids, first-timers and other upstarts can end up doing so well in this bee is that they've never been before, and they had no idea what to expect going in. Kids perform well in this kind of environment, because kids are nothing if not adaptable. However, it's the older kids, the repeat performers, or the ones whose siblings did the bee before that have had the time to think about the enormity of the bee and let their little nerves fray. Now, there are some kids with the mental fortitude to learn from their mistakes, come back for the second year in a row and win it all--but for every one of them there are a handful more that had a meltdown at the local level because the memory of last year was too fresh.

It's OK to laugh at these kids when you watch the bee on Thursday night, because they will (hopefully) be looking back at it and laughing at themselves too in a couple years. But they will almost undoubtedly be doing it as med school students or participants in an accelerated doctorate program, so they get the last laugh.

*Seriously, look at the lyrics to that song. It's totally about spelling bees.

Lauren McMahon (e-mail, website) writes "Too Much Information" on Mondays at noon. Find out more here.

9 Comments

All those kids from Spellbound are now in college and you can look them up on facebook. The girl who one the Spellbound year, April, goes to NYU and I tried to make her be my friend but she'd have none of it. Just goes to show that spelling bee kids have no social skills.

Posted by: alexis,right? | May 29, 2007 at 12:06 PM

I was writing about spelling and I typed "one." That's won. How awful.

A guy I played trumpet with in college went to math camp with the kid pictured at the bottom of this post. (You know the talking robot kid. What was his name? Harry?) So I got the kid's e-mail address and sent him some fan mail. But I certainly didn't extend him facebook friendship. What kind of weirdo are you, Alexis?

Posted by: Tori | May 29, 2007 at 12:55 PM

Wow. I had not idea the Spelling Bee was this week. I just wanted to win the "choose the theme" race and the first thing i saw was seriouxbeez. I guess I am just an awesome theme chooser...even if I can't remember to do a theme announcement because my week was thrown off by a holiday.

Posted by: Caitlar | May 29, 2007 at 01:25 PM