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Unspelling™
Dateline: 10/23/05
By David H. Albert
I took the day off from work. I was feeling quite under the
weather (and we have a lot of weather where I live!) I
settled myself into my ten-dollar, coffee-stained Salvation Army
recliner (being brown to begin with among its saving graces),
tea in hand (encupped, of course), two dogs happily yawning at
my feet, and began to channel surf. Yes, guilty as charged. I
throw myself on the mercy of the court, my only mitigating circumstance
being that my eyes have declined to the point that it is now
difficult to read unless I am in tip-top physical condition.
Switch to ESPN. I am in luck! Well, maybe. No Gaelic stone-tossing,
or heavyweight Strong Man auto-pulling. Today is the National
Spelling Bee! I probably would have preferred college
women's softball or trial runs for the Iditarod,
but this promises to be different.
It is scheduled for five hours (as long as two Montana
State football games!) It will never in my affections surpass
Olympic
curling (wish I could get those guys with brooms to come
to my house! and why isn't this sport co-ed, inquiring minds
want to know?) or singles
synchronized swimming, but it is deadly addictive. In exchange
for a single $10,000 college scholarship, parents and schools
across the entire United States have united in this cruel effort
to uncover their children's spelling deficits. ESPN rakes in
hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising revenue on the
assumption that I am more likely to purchase golfing shoes (I
HATE golf!) or use "Duz" ("May I have the language
of origin, please?") to take care of those nasty grass stains
if they can just keep me glued for the next five hours to my
recliner. The advertisers are probing for my deficits as well.
Well, here I am.
Don't get me wrong now: I've taken as much delight in homeschoolers'
recent monopoly of the National Spelling Bee as the next
homeschooler, and have been just as outraged by official attempts
to limit our kids' participation. But, as a Washington
Post staff writer recently wrote, this really is "an
archaic exercise in brutality". The idea behind the Spelling
Bee is that one is supposed to keep one's deficit hidden as long
as possible, while hundreds of other prepubescent geeks (having
been one myself, I remember the feeling) reveal their fatal flaws
and are banished ignominiously from the island. No team spirit
here; there definitely will not be any bug-swallowing for the
good of the group. And most assuredly there are not two Miss
Spelling Bee North Carolinas.
No, once the fatal flaw is revealed, as in Survivor
II, one has to leave, alone, returning, with any luck, to
a more comfortable surround. It's one giant 'sudden death' playoff.
So there it is, five hours of morbidly watching kids fail!
But not only that, for as the game progresses, the words get
harder and harder, and, progressively, less and less useful.
Consider how many times you have utilized any of the following
words in your writing or speech in the past several decades:
xanthosis;
vivisepulture;
euonym;
chiaroscurist;
logorrhea;
demarche;
succedaneum;
prospicience.
These were the final words in each of the last eight National
Spelling Bees. (I would note that my spellchecker highlights
all but one of them as misspelled. Now going for one milllion
dollars, can you tell us which one? And for ten million: use
all eight in a single, meaningful sentence - you have 60 seconds.
Ready?) (I just did: "The following words - xanthosis, vivisepulture,
etc., etc. - never appear together in an English sentence."
Applause!) One word you don't see on this list is triskaidekaphobia,
a word that has probably resulted in more banishments than any
other. (Meaning? Fear of the number 13!) Meera, having just mastered
triskaidekaphobia, has just downloaded a list of 276 other
phobia
words, and is now busy memorizing.
I finally managed to turn it off. There! That wasn't so bad,
was it? Next time, scanning the globe for the world of sport,
there are a host of other events I'd prefer to see (I hope the
folks at ESPN are reading this), such as the Great
Bathtub Race of Nome, Alaska, the World Championship Rotary
Tiller Race (which, as everyone knows, is part of the
PurpleHull Pea Festival
of Emerson, Arkansas, or the Extreme
Ironing World Championships, last held in Munich. I also
might express a preference for the World Bog-Snorkeling Championships,
"run" (?) every August in Llanwrtyd (love the spelling),
Wales, or the Punkin
Chunkin World Championships held in Rehoboth, Delaware. (There
are college scholarships attached to this one!) To be sure, none
of these will outdo my predilection for the Cooper
Hill Annual Cheese Rolling and Wake, a favorite of the BBC
and an event known through documentary evidence to be at least
200 years old, and which may date back as far as pre-Arthurian
Britain. If there are advertisers, there is sure to be an audience,
or is it the other way around? I think there is likely a lot
less violence associated with these (with the possible exception
of Extreme Ironing) than with word-flaying.
Really, I guess it's not too terrible to have a Little League
World Series of Spelling. Some of our children will never make
it as shortstops, and, if they like competition and arcane words,
this is their chance for 15 minutes of fame.
But for most of our kids, this is not a good, or even particularly
enjoyable way to advance the spelling skill. As enthusiastic
as we may be, some of them are less than enthusiastic in learning
about Latin and Greek
roots, terms
for obscure medical diagnoses, or even spending a lot of
time with the dictionary.
And they shouldn't have to. For many children, with lots of
good reading and good conversation that allows them to expand
their conceptual horizons, spelling takes care of itself. In
terms of vocabulary, research has shown that the average five-year-old
child (if there is such a thing as an "average" child)
knows approximately 10,000 words. She will gain another 2,000-3,000
words a year until her vocabulary at age 18 will be approximately
40,000. And again, with more good reading and good conversation,
it will just keep growing. (The same studies show that in classrooms,
children are formally introduced to no more than 300-500 words
a year, and since they may already have known about half of them
before being "taught", they are obviously getting well
more than three-quarters of them from somewhere else!)
They learn to spell them, too. Some simply remember words
after seeing them in print. Others draw phonemic
analogies from other words they have heard or seen, and that
works about 90% of the time. Still others pick it up through
the computer
spellchecker.
Parents who participated in spelling bees as children have
repeatedly given me a tidbit that I think we can put to good
use. They always remember the word that stumped them in the childhood
spelling bee, and now (unlike so many other words) always spell
it correctly (although I have also met one person who is permanently
blocked from ever feeling that she can spell this particular
word), even as they remember the shame and embarrassment of having
been banished from the island. So I began to ask myself whether
there might be a way of making use of this insight, without the
shame, embarrassment, and banishment that characterized the competition.
And I've found one! I've now used it with a dozens of kids
ages 7 to 15 (adults, too), and it works. They always want to
do more of it. It's a game I've given the name Unspelling™.
Unspelling™ works like this: one person picks
a source word. Then, in turn, each of the players must spell
this word incorrectly, but with a basis in a sound-analogy with
the way another word (or words) is correctly spelled. If challenged,
she must produce that word. If you run out of spellings, if you
repeat a previous Unspelling™, or if you spell the word
correctly, you're out. The first few times you play, it
is easier to write the Unspelling™ words on a blackboard
or piece of butcher paper hung on the wall, but doing it without
aid of writing will enhance memory development.
Example: the Unspelling™ source word is "phonics".
phonix
phonicks
phoknics
fanix
faknicks
phonnix
phonnicks
phannicks |
fonix
foknicks
phanics
phanicks
faknics
fonnix
fannics |
fonics
phoknicks
fanics
fanicks
phaknics
fonnicks
phonnicks |
fonicks
foknics
phanix
phaknicks
fonnics
fannicks
phannics |
One could add words beginning with "pf" as in "pfennig"
(German currency, but used in English, it appears in the dictionary.)
(And if one decides to allow analogies with Polish or Slavic
proper names, the list might expand to include words ending in
"icz".)
Get the idea? A favorite Unspelling™ source word of mine
is "weighty" (which has among the strangest correct
spellings). Just to get started:
waytee
whaytie
etc. |
wheytea
wayttie |
whaytea
waittea |
weitie
weightea |
You can see that this particular Unspelling™ source word
would make for a very long list!
The benefits of Unspelling™ are obvious, or at least
they are to me. First of all, once kicked out of the game for
spelling a word correctly, it will never be forgotten. Secondly,
players come away with an expanded sense of the phonetic possibilities
of the language, which will help both with future spelling questions,
and in figuring out pronunciation from written sources.
More important than either of these, Unspelling™ is fun!
A lot more fun than the spelling bee, or so every kid who has
ever tried it has told me. Probably more fun than Extreme Ironing
or Bog-Snorkeling (at least for many), though I doubt it can
measure up with the Cheese Rolling. ESPN - are you there? We
are almost ready for prime time!
|
- Have Fun. Learn Stuff. Grow.: Homeschooling
and the Curriculum of Love
by David H. Albert
- (September, 2005)
- Gently and passionately, homeschooling advocate David H.
Albert insists that the curriculum of love is not about externals.
It is about what is essential in each individual human being,
and in every child. Its code words are communication, inquisitiveness,
acceptance, joy, honesty, and courage.
-
- The article here is from a chapter in Mr. Albert's book above,
republished with his permission.
-
- And the Skylark Sings with Me
by David H. Albert
A delightful book. A family's unschooling journey to excellence.
I couldn't put it down. 1999 Paperback.
-
- Homeschooling
and the Voyage of Self-Discovery: A Journey of Original Seeking
- by David H. Albert
- Order
from Author instead
-
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