That may be because of the structure of the competitions but I don’t know if that is certain. The winners always seem to be 12 and 13 years old, not 17 or 18 years old (which would still put them in the high school age bracket).
Nevertheless, from my own anecdotal experience, I find that my inherent ability to spell words correctly has diminished with age. In grade school I used to win the spelling bees on a consistent basis. Now, spell-check is my closest friend. Something changed and I don’t know what or why.
Any insight?
Is there something about the human brain that determines that the ability to spell words correctly in easier for a youngster than an adult?
Didn’t know that but geez, what’s the point of the competition and why do the headlines feature the winner’s age? It’s like saying , “18 year old Puck Mollester is the top scorer on the USA National 18 and Under hockey team.” BFD that he’s 18.
Now I want to know who the “real” spelling champ is.
Same here. I was always winning spelling bees, and now I get tripped up by some fairly simple words. Some possible reasons:
It’s part of the normal aging process (my once-amazing math skills are gone too).
We don’t read as much as we used to.
The internet. It used to be, we rarely saw a word misspelled. Printing and typesetting were done by professionals, and type was always proofread. Sure, we saw misspellings in personal correspondence or makeshift signs, but when we saw a word in print, it was spelled correctly . . . and the correct spelling became etched in our minds. Now, we read a great deal on the internet, and you see words spelled every which way, resulting in confusion, even with words we used to be sure of.
Yes, but not on the level of the Scripps. My local library sponsors an adult spelling bee, and many literacy programs hold spelling bees as fundraisers: They recruit more-or-less prominent people from communities and businesses and charge entry fees, and people come see them. But to go big, you need sponsorship and organization.
I don’t think the “we see more misspelled words” theory works – I notice them all. Of course, I also don’t think my spelling skills have declined with age. Since I’m in the biz, though, that may cause MMtoV.
If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say that there’s a direct correlation between age and spelling ability, but an inverse correlation between age and performance in a spelling bee. Two factors are at work in a spelling bee: the active recall of the the word in question (crystallized intelligence) and the performance of chanting out the spelling in front of a crowd (fluid intelligence). If the participants were, say, just sitting in a comfortable room while being asked the spelling of a word, though, I’d definitely say there’s a direct correlation between spelling ability and age.
On a related topic, I think part of the reason that we don’t see many older spelling bee champs is that the events are considered a sort of juvenile exercise in academics. I think age appropriate correlates for high school and college students would be something along the lines of poetry, clever word play (rapping, maybe?), or essay writing. In any case, it seems that spelling becomes one factor of a more complicated process as we age, and it’s a little “beneath” older students to just stand up and bellow out the composition of the word “diarrhea” while a sweaty old man holds a stop watch. It does make for good showmanship to have local celebrities in the position, though, because of the juxtaposition between the juvenile nature of the exercise and the social status of the participant.
The things that are expected to be standard skills change as technology changes over the years.
I once read an article from a couple hundred years ago, where the author was complaining that ‘many people that were otherwise well-educated gentlemen were not able to tell the time of day accurately by looking at the position of the sun or stars in the sky’. And he blamed it on the new-fangled trend of men carrying pocket watches.
Now pocket watches, and wrist watches too, are declining in usage, as the younger generations are using their cell phone or ipod as timepieces.
My math students are often uncertain which way is “clockwise” when we do rotations in the co-ordinate plane. They are not used to looking at analog clocks. :eek:
A long time ago I decided to learn how to spell because I hated looking up words. Spelling is pure memorization, and at the age of 54 I’m still the best speller I know.
I also decided to memorize people’s phone numbers for the same reason, and I discovered it was the same process of memorization. This was when people only had a home and an office phone.
In this age of faxes and cell phones, being able to memorize phone numbers is the most useful ability I have.
Ahh, the pocket watch. Jesus phone of the 17th century. Newton would appear on apple ads during the Enlightenment era with his pocket watch above the text “think different.” Coffee-drinking yuppies would compulsively check up on theirs while furiously pamphleteering about their crappy, tyrannical governments and the latest pocket-watch rumors.
