On Friday, "Akeelah and the Bee," a movie about a Los Angeles girl who overcomes adversity to win the national spelling bee, opened nationwide, taking eighth place at the weekend box office.Television cameras have been a part of the Bee experience at least since I competed, but movies about the Bee are a tribute to the increasing power geeks hold in society.
That film follows last year's "Bee Season," about a man focused on his daughter's quest to become a spelling bee champ. It was based on the best-selling novel by Myla Goldberg.
Also last year, the Broadway musical, "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee," won two Tony awards. And the 2002 documentary "Spellbound" followed eight teenagers during their quest to win the 1999 National Spelling Bee.
I was a spelling bee nerd before it was sexy.
4 comments:
Hmm. I don't think spelling bees are sexy, and I don't think this craze is the result of geeks with power. I think it's just the result of a culture that's in denial and desperately wants to believe that American kids aren't idiots.
See, I couldn't care less if an infinitesimal percentage of children can spell all those words they had in the little boxes down at Starbucks — those words that receive extremely limited usage in day-to-day conduct and transactions. Rather, I would like to see most children able to spell ordinary, commonly used words. (As well, I would greatly appreciate, when I look through applications for employment at the bookstore where I work, to find that not a single one of them has misspelled the name of their school, or anything else, for that matter. It's one thing to make a spelling error in passing, but when you're writing in ink on a job application and you have the time to think and look stuff up, there's no excuse.)
Rather than being impressed by spelling bees or excited by their recent re-entry to the popular consciousness, I find them ridiculous affairs that are mainly just propaganda to make people feel exceedingly good about something exceedingly insubstantial so that perhaps they'll not notice the rest of the disaster that is our educational system.
So a disadvantaged kid from Los Angeles took it all the way to the top by learning to spell. Great. For her. Only one person every year can do that. What about all the other thousands and thousands of children who are stuck at the bottom of society and have to find some other, less glamorous way to make something of their lives?
The spelling bee craze is just misdirection and propaganda. Count me out of the joy and excitement. Just give me some job applicants who haven't been intellectually crippled by their education at the hands of idiot politicians and the parade of worker-bee drones that emanates from teacher education programs. (If only all public school teachers could sustain the kind of interesting and critical thinking that occurs on this blog . . . alas.)
For the purpose of full disclosure, my own spelling bee experience in the 4th grade never made it past about five or six words in the grade-level competition at my elementary school. For some reason, I couldn't spell "daisies" and said "d-a-i-s-y-s" like a fool. But I turned out okay and now I am the guy turn to and say, "How do you spell deoxyribonucleic?"
Or rather, "I am the guy people turn to and say . . ."
Also, I would like "to find that not a single one of the applicants has misspelled . . ."
(Stupid habit of proofreading after clicking "publish.")
It isn't about intelligence; kids today are as smart as they've ever been. It's a culture of carelessness, aided and abetted by undemanding parents, lazy teachers, and gee-whiz technology. Why should I bother to proofread if spellcheck can do it for me? For that matter, why should I revise my first draft? I don't care, and you can't make me.
Kids today are just as intelligent as they have ever been in the same way that a microprocessor sitting on a table is still an amazing piece of technology, even though it's worthless without being integrated into a system it can control.
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