Back in the days, in the 90s when schooling was something that allowed parents to live their unfulfilled dreams through their children making them achieve the 1st and 2nd positions in class there was this notorious game which all schools had called the ‘spelling bee’ contest. My school never arranged a spelling bee with that name but on and off we had class competitions where our teachers would challenge us to spell challenging words of the English language.
As kids we always wanted to up one another. But when you put a group of teenage girls against teenage boys, its mostly the raging hormones doing the spelling and the idea of winning against the other gender and celebrating the win that’s the motivating factor. We were nothing different.
As all growing teenage kids I was a brilliant speller in my class and wanted to out-do even myself. It was addictive. Learning new languages is kind of a thing with me. Our competitions were different. We competed in groups always. So whenever we had the so-called spelling bees we always had a strategy; me and my friends. While the easier words were taken by anyone the more difficult words were taken up by only a few which included me and a few others.
Mind you this strategy had nothing to do with intelligence. We were not with an IQ of 200+. We were just good at memorizing and visualization. And now when I see spelling bees I am struck by the complexities that a child of grade 5 and 6 is given. We were never given extremely hard words even when we were in Grade 10.
So why do we want children in grade 5 to memorize words like ‘apparatchik’ , ‘beelzebub’, ‘damoclean’ or even ‘ginglymus’? Heck I don’t even know the meaning of these words and my passtime is browsing through the dictionary sometimes!
I feel that our obsession with wanting to see children excel at things we couldn’t has become over-bearing. Yes, these children are amazingly visual and have amazing listening powers and analytical skills but would they be able to secure linguistic jobs in the future? Or can they put those skills to any other use is still to be seen.
Secondly our drive to show a good face of the educational system has also become over-bearing. Can a child who can just 'memorize' be a good 'decision maker'? We certainly need to make less money off the educational system to see the real consequence of such competitions.
As for myself, I do peruse the dictionary and love learning new languages. But that is about it and that so far has no practical use except for getting me a job as a translator which is something I wouldn’t like to do.