Is it possible to have less than no sympathy? Because I have no sympathy for little Suzie Thirdplace who gets to go because her fucking parents threatened to sue, and I’d like it to be possible for me to have less than no sympathy for any dipshit parent or student who signs something stating they’ve read the rules when they haven’t.
But don’tcha see? By being unsympathetic to Suzie Thirdplace, she’s been dealt the unkind smack of reality, like the kiss of a chilled trout upside the noggin. Suzie will aimlessly doodle in the margins, fail 9th grade miserably, sit brooding in her room smoking sea monkeys and listening to scratched Mantovani records played at the wrong speed, have indiscriminate sex, produce kidlets of dubious parentage, and forever be a ward of the state-all because you weren’t sympathetic enough. This is why we need Litigation R Us to manage life. :rolleyes: You were correct with the thread title.
It’s not an invalid presumption. The parents will sign the thing saying they’ve read the rules, and if they don’t actually ask to read them, it’s clearly their own fault and not the school’s.
Except that “clearly” and “fault” are not distinct words in lawyerdom.
Maybe I’m tired, but I have no idea what you’re trying to say. Tell me why having people sign a disclaimer will encouage more suits?
In second grade, I got disqualified from my school’s spelling bee, because I misheard the word they gave me in one of the final rounds, though I said it, spelled it, than said the (misheard) word completely correctly. And at no time did the teachers stop me, till I’d finished.
The teachers in fact weren’t sure what to do, because what I misheard the word as, was much harder than the actual word they’d given me. But still, I gave the wrong word spelled. They had given me “frog”. However, I heard, said, spelled then said again “fraud”. Correctly, mind you. (I can still remember the butterflies-in-the-stomach, roller-coaster falling over the big hump feeling of “oh shit!” when I “heard” the word…fraud was a fucking hard word for a 7 year old! Of course, in hindsight, now knowing that it was actually FROG they gave me to spell in one of the final rounds - there were only about 5 kids left at that point- when I was fully able to spell fraud still seems an insult to my second grade intelligence)
I dropped out of high school at 17, got my GED, started stripping at 18, and at the age of almost 34, am still dancing for a living.
Not that I want to blame it on my “spelling bee tragedy”, or even that it was in any way a cause, but… you think I could still sue? 
(As a post-script, they actually gave me a nice award, even though I got dropped for spelling the wrong word, and at that stage shouldn’t have gotten any award at all. Apparently they were so stunned a 7 year old was spelling fraud from memory, they didn’t even think to react in time to prevent me from getting kicked from the Bee, but felt bad about me getting dropped for being too well-read after the fact. chuckle As much as ammunition as I have to criticize my parents about my upbringing with, my love of literacy and reading is never going to be something I can fault them for. It’s by farone of the greatest gifts they ever gave me, imo.)
Not a spelling bee, but…
Second grade. I was reading at a much higher level (not a boast, it’s relevant). A lot of what I was reading happened to be written by British authors, so I’d discovered the new uses of the letter ‘u’ in spelling. ‘Colour’ is the word I’m in fact thinking of. I asked my mother one day why this book spelled ‘color’ differently.
“That’s how they do it in England,” she said. “It’s correct.”
Second grade spelling test. I spell it ‘colour’. We pass the tests to our neighbors (neighbours!) for grading, and I think “Well. They’re going to mark it wrong because they won’t know better, but I’ll take it to the teacher after class and he’ll understand.” Keep in mind also that we had a little journal in which we were supposed to mark down the words we’d spelled wrong. This will become important later.
As predicted, I got the question wrong. I took the quiz to my teacher and explained that in fact this was the right spelling, sir. “It’s not the spelling I’m testing you on,” he said.
“But it IS correct!”
“Yes. But I’m not giving you credit for it.”
:smack:
Weeks pass. I’d been keeping an assiduous little journal of spelling mistakes. There weren’t many, and I would note down beside the word how I’d misspelled it the time before, usually in parentheses. Then came the day we were supposed to write all the words on the board that we’d misspelled. One kid would hold our books and read out the words to us and we’d write them on the board.
“Chad.”
“Huh? What’s ‘chad’? That’s not one of our spelling words.”
“It’s right here.”
I go over and look. Sure enough, it’s chad. Or rather, it’s “(bad” . With “spelling)” at the end, I believe.
"No – look, that’s not a misspelled word – "
“You have to write it on the board.”
I appealed to the teacher. “Just write it on the board,” he says.
Bitter? Me?
Sorry my meaning eluded you. My point was and is that you, me, most rational folks and a big spotted dog agree about rules of contests, and aren’t going to launch a suit over such a matter anyway. Those who are inclined to weasel will do so no matter what, even if it necessitates them hiring a professional to weasel on their behalf.
They can try. But I think this solution has cut down on the weasleing room.
The school did screw up here, after all. It’s absurd that this got to the “I’ll sue!” stage, but it seems to me things have pretty much been set right.
Another bitter memory (non-spelling-bee division):
In junior high for an essay I compared the telephone to Pisistratus on the basis of both being tyrants ruling our lives. The teacher rejected it on the ground that since the telephone hadn’t been invented in Pisistratus’s time, one couldn’t compare the two.
To this day I don’t understand that rationale.
#I’m going with the “Huh?” crowd. How could a legal document precluding legal action lead to more legal action?
I’m all about cynicism, but I don’t get this.#
Oh wait, (and I’m leaving my original post as is for self embarssement(sp?) purposes - everything between the # signs). Damnit - what you’re saying is that parents having signed a waiver doesn’t clear the court docket of frivolous lawsuits. It would make it easier to get rid of them, but the time and energy has still been used.
Is he ever teh st00pid!
I’ve never been in a spelling bee (I’d have lost bad…my spelling sucks). But when I was in high school, I was on my School Reach team.
My first year (and only Junior year, since this was my grade 10 year, thanks to a strike in my grade 9 year), we got first place.
But Juniors don’t go to the Provincial or National level, so that’s as far as that went.
My first Senior year, we get to the finals. We’re doing well.
We get the question ‘In English literature, who is the Queen of the Fairies?’ I ring in with ‘Titania.’
Wrong.
Other team doesn’t get it, either. In fact, they argue the validity of my answer. Quizmaster will have none of it.
We go on to lose by one point.
On review, it’s decided my answer was a valid answer to the question as written, but the other team’s win would stand.
‘Eh,’ I think, ‘we’ll take it next year.’
Sadly, in my grade 12 and OAC years, we took second place. Again.
I will never forgive that Quizmaster. (But nobody sued!)
That’s the story about the three women from the Protestant side of the Northern Irish divide making a bold statement for peace at the height of the Troubles by attending a Catholic bingo night. Silence fell when they entered the church hall, and reigned for several seconds until the Father overseeing the proceedings took a firm hand. “Three chairs for the Protestant ladies!” he commanded, in tones that brooked no disobedience. And his well-trained congregation responded…
Yes. We have an annual spelling be at my job (where - ahem - presumably everyone is an adult), but we do teams, and the winning team goes on to the city-wide competition against other local businesses.
Now for my tale of woe:
2nd grade. Down to the final four. The word? Road. I spelled it R-O-D-E, because in 2nd grade, who knows all that schnuff about asking for it in a sentence?
Teacher explains that no, she meant the kind of road that you walk on, and so counts me out and goes on to the next kid who, having heard the definition and my spelling of it, spells it R-O-D-E.
Guess who got the pink third place ribbon? Not me . . .
But then in middle school I duked it out with a kid in the grade below me and rocked the house on the word “baroquely”.
I won a dollar. 
No one will believe me but I’ll say it.
I read, “I blew an aorta in fifth grade.” I was wondering what word you’d misspelled in the bee to cause such a reaction. :o
I don’t know how you people did your spelling bees, but we took them seriously!
Chesapeake.
Asphyxiate.
No bitterness here.
It hurts to lose a spelling bee, but that does not justify wreaking vengeance upon an entire watershed.
I spelled “phthisic.” The only reason I knew it was I looked on the word list and thought, “What the hell is this word? [Yes, when I was 12 the phrase “what the hell” was not only in my vocabulary but I had to be on constant guard not to say it out loud in front of the wrong person, i.e., my mother.] This word looks like a character in ‘Li’l Abner.’” The word list did not have definitions (I don’t think it had pronunciations either–but I could be wrong about that). So I went to the dictionary. It was not there. I checked a different desk dictionary. Not there, either. I went to the bigger dictionary in the library, where I finally found it, something like “wasting away from pulmonary consumption.”
Now all this took place over the course of several weeks, so by then this word was quite firmly set in my mind. When I actually got the word, which is pronounced “tisic,” I had a moment of shock when I could practically feel myself glowing. I saw that shock mirrored on the face of the moderator when I started spelling, “P-H…”
In this particular competition each contestant got only one word–that is, if I had misspelled phthisic it wouldn’t have gone to the next contestant (who BTW got a fairly easy word).
I blew it in the next round. I don’t remember the word, but it was easier than phthisic.