I've moved!

For those of you looking for the continuation of this blog, I've moved my energies to this site. A great source for those interested in the spelling bee, and more particularly, those who are interested in being coached for the bee. For now, I will let my potential interest in tutoring other grade school and middle school subjects go; I may return to this interest in the future.

I'll see you on my new website! Happy spelling!

Anamika Veeramani's spelling coach: Janice Hearst

So here's a simple video of Janice Hearst, who coached 2010 National Spelling Bee winner Anamika Veeramani. Hearst had coached her since 4th grade...quite impressive! Here, Hearst just speaks to the qualities that made Anamika such a deserving winner. Hearst also tips her hat to Anamika's family, and the strong love and support they gave to her, which I can personally say is instrumental to a speller's success.

Spelling bees and sports (and other competitions)

After a particularly punishing weightlifting workout today, I found myself in the gym locker room watching ESPN's coverage of high school football. A man standing nearby expressed his surprise that a station like ESPN would be showing this, since normally, high school football is a bit on the amateur side. I said that perhaps the games were played by teams that show particularly excellent players with promise for a good college career.

But then he said, "You know what really gets me? Why does ESPN show spelling bees? I mean, what in the world does a spelling bee have to do with sports?" I couldn't help but immediately blurt out, "You're talking to a national champion here. Spelling bees have TONS to do with sports. Much more than you realize." He seemed chastened, then turned back to talking about high school football on ESPN.

Part of me wishes I hadn't been so quick to shut this guy down. I might have been able to explain things further. But I'm not so sure if he was in a space to listen so much as he just wanted to express his opinion and leave it there.

On the surface, yes, spelling bees are pretty cerebral and inactive compared with, say, basketball or football. But here are some similarities that, in my mind, qualify them unequivocally for primetime viewing on the biggest cable sports channel.

• Competition. Fundamentally, the National Spelling Bee is a full-out competition, not a simple cake-walk for fun.
• Adrenaline. Anyone can tell you how nervewracking a bee is. The silence that ensues when a speller gets a word he or she doesn't know, and stands there, sometimes in terror, can split a heart. Talk about getting your adrenaline pumping...this matches up with any other sport. Plus, you have the added component of not being able to physically act out on your stress...you need to stay calm, alert, and focus, using only your wits to maneuver through each round.
• Coaches. This is a relatively small aspect of preparing (or training) for spelling bees. Not every speller has a coach. The majority of spellers only rely on parents or teachers for training. But on the national level, many spellers with sights on primetime ESPN or even hoisting the trophy in victory are increasingly enlisting the help of coaches (including yours truly).
• Preparation. Anyone who has achieved the national level of competition has put in hours upon hours of preparation.
• The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat. Enough said. (Incidentally, those of you of a certain age will probably remember this.)

Now, it is true that there are other cerebral competitions on par with spelling bees that share each of these traits. The National Geographic Bee and MathCounts come immediately to mind. Neither of these have the same prestige or exposure that the National Spelling Bee has, and I believe this is for a few reasons. First, the spelling bee has a much longer tradition in American culture; you could argue that it is as American as baseball, Mom, apple pie, and the archetypal little red schoolhouse. Second, the competition itself has been around since 1925, whereas Mathcounts had its first national competition in 1984, and the National Geographic Bee followed five years later. Although I haven't seen either of these competitions, I suspect these would be as riveting as a spelling bee for the more cerebrally-oriented. (Apparently, the National Geographic Bee is televised on PBS, and takes place in late May; the national MathCounts competition takes place a few weeks earlier, and the decisive part of the competition is usually webcast.)

So maybe the National Spelling Bee is not a physical "sport," per se, but the similarities with other sports do qualify it for an annual presence on ESPN...at least unless a new cable channel is developed that could be specific to more cerebral competitions. But in the meantime, I believe that competitions of all sorts will do just fine on ESPN.

Missed American Pi!

Apparently, our fair country hit a population milestone yesterday that should appeal to all math and science nerds and geeks out there. We achieved π x 10^8 people in the US. (That's 314,159,265 Americans.)

What does this mean in the grand scheme of things? Probably very little. But there's your fun fact for the day. And I missed being on top of this news by one day! Oh well.

Word of the Day

If you are interested in learning more about our fascinating language, one word at a time, here's a great resource: Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day. It's courtesy of Peter Sokolowski, the editor at large at Merriam-Webster. Here, you can learn not just the basic information about words, like the part of speech and definition, but also information about their etymologies, and even anecdotes about their places in history. The words are sometimes commonplace (nectar, intestine), but they usually veer toward the more complex and sometimes arcane (ahimsa, bruit).

It's a great resource for anyone looking to improve their vocabulary. I especially recommend subscribing to the podcast.

"America is not the greatest country in the world anymore."

Pretty dismal assessment, right? Well, that's the take-away from HBO's brand-new series The Newsroom, where Jeff Bridges's curmudgeonly character has a breakdown during a panel at Northwestern University, and says precisely that (complete with a number of expletives, so be forewarned). Take it away, Jeff:

Some pretty compelling, sobering facts there. What happened? Or more to the point, how can we get back on track? I'm certainly not an expert in the educational realm...not a teacher, not a policy wonk, not an administrator. My only claim is as a spelling coach over the past year. But this concerns me. And not because of some "rah-rah-we're-number-1" sentiment.

Well, okay...maybe a little bit. Who wouldn't want to be #1? Especially since we have been there before. I remember back in the early 1990s, when evidence was beginning to mount that American children and teenagers were starting to slip in academic performance, beginning to be outdone, primarily by Asians. Since that time, at least one source indicates that much of eastern Asia and Europe has passed us by now.

But more important than a chest-thumping sentiment is this fact...one that has always been true, but which grows truer and more urgent each day: We need to be as well-educated as possible in subjects that will help us address the challenges that we face every day. And a country that has been as blessed with natural resources, a relatively intelligent population, and a history of ambition and industry as ours should be regularly contributing a lion's share of well-educated, well-prepared children, teenagers, and adults to address these challenges.

I'm sure there are more well-researched, more inspiring words to read than this platitude, but there's my sentiment.

"y = mx + b" and teaching

I've been trying to brush up on some algebra from years past. It's amazing, the little things you forget when you don't use them on a daily basis. For example, the equation to determine the slope of a line? I remembered y = mx + b, but that doesn't necessarily help, especially if you don't know what in the world b is. (The y-intercept...where a line crosses the y axis.) Suddenly, upon hearing "rise over run," it all came back. It would be amusing to be a tutor for algebra and not know basics like this. Then again, who knows? Students might actually benefit from having to explain things to me. Teaching a topic really requires that you know exactly what you're talking about.