Spelling Bee

Caroline Tompkins

Even before I get down to the real work of editing the word list during the weeks before the county bee in 2002, I discard desuetude and eleemosynary. I would hate to stumble while pronouncing one of these for a nervous kid waiting at the microphone. I am not sure I have ever heard anyone actually say either of them, and they don’t show up much in my reading. But for the later rounds, when we pare the field to our final two contestants, the ones who will go on to state, I may need some equally obscure words, but ones that I can say without hesitating or backtracking. At least I speak the local dialect, voweling and accenting in my native western urban American English, never saying “Tee-YOOS-day” for “TOOS-day” or “tuh-MAH-toh” for “tuh-MAY-toh.” A quick read-through tells me I can manage the other 498 words in this year’s collection, although I probably won’t need mor e than three hundred of them. Deciding which three hundred is part of my job as Pronouncer.

Like a mismatched gaggle of ducklings, the sixty spellers from all over Pima County follow Kim, the bee coordinator, in a line up the steps to the left of the stage. On this Sunday afternoon in February 2002, the third time I have presided over this annual event, the tallest eighth grader towers over the lone third grader by at least two feet, while the other elementary and middle school champions take up every possible height in between. Some of the girls wear dresses, but only one of the boys has on a tie. Most still wear the childhood uniform of jeans, casual shirts, sneakers. But the shirts are tucked in and the sneakers tied, and these kids arrange themselves uncommonly quickly into the rows of chairs on the stage. With numbered placards on strings around their necks to show seating—and spelling—order, the kids, together as a group for the first time, act as if they have practiced this for days. Just before he disappears into a seat toward the back of the stage, I catch a glimpse of Carlton, a boy I know, a boy whose spelling I don’t recall but whose energetic intelligence and creativity I do. He left the school where I was principal three or four years ago when his family moved out of the neighborhood. I count and realize he will be in seventh grade now, and I don’t know how I missed seeing him when the families came in and found seats during the half hour before we started. I always got along with his parents, so I wonder why they didn’t come down to the front of the auditorium to say hi.
    While we were setting up today, Steven, a dark-eyed eighth grader back from last year, did come up to say hello. One tail of his tucked-in Hawaiian-style shirt threatened to pop over the waistband of his jeans, and he clutched a tattered paperback from one of those robots-in-space series. Looking just to one side of my face, he reminded me that he had placed fourth last year, and he really hoped to win this one so he could go on to the state bee. Going to state, with its chance to qualify for the National Spelling Bee, drives Steven and a few of the others. Before Kim called the kids to line up, a couple of other nervous and fidgety boys who have been here before stopped by to see me, saying things like, “Hi! Remember me? I was here last year too.”
    I don’t but pretend I do, smile, and say, “Good luck!” Equal encouragement for all.
    The boys who have come down to talk to me move on, circling the auditorium’s perimeter or hiking up and then back down the aisle, reminding me of swimmers or runners before they are called to position at the starting line. While the boys pace, the girls sit with their parents, waiting until Kim calls them to line up.
    I know some just showed up because they won a school bee and will take their chances in this one. Their parents won’t see the documentary film Spellbound when it comes out a year or so later, and they have taken no extraordinary steps to get their kids ready for this local bee. A few arrive unaware of the sudden-death format, the one-miss-you’re-out setup. And these are the ones who trigger my second thoughts about this odd game of wordslinging, who oblige me to make it both friendly and fair, to keep it local, to reenact a tradition that doesn’t yet fight a backlash.

When I volunteered some years ago to be the Pronouncer for this county bee, I still worked as a principal in the public schools. As an eighth grader back in 1960, I had spelled my way to the state championship. These credentials cinched my appointment to this once-a-year post, one that I expected to be largely ceremonial. When I won the county bee forty years earlier, we wrote out our words in the old-fashioned way rather than stand up to spell, but in the late fall of 1999, I found that I would be calling our school champions to a microphone one by one, taking as many rounds of spelling-out-loud as necessary to produce two winners who would go on to state. In the 1960 county bee, Dr. Larson, a university professor of speech, pronounced the words. Dr. Larson seemed old, tall, red-faced, remote, with a gargly voice. Straining to hear through his inclination to swallow endings, I never thought twice about where he got the words he gave us to spell.
    Back in my first year as Pronouncer, I asked the bee coordinator about the word list. “Oh, you get to finalize it,” she said. “I’ll send you a copy so you can go through it before the bee.”
    It turned out that finalizing meant I could remove words that seemed too easy or hard for their place on the list, or ones whose clarifying sentences didn’t clarify. In fact, she said, I could rewrite the sentences if I wanted to. Each word in the master list comes with a definition and a sentence, along with language of origin, part of speech, and pronunciation guide. The contestants can ask for any of these details to help them with a spelling. I learned early on that this constructed list inevitably betrays the background, viewpoints, and biases of its anonymous compiler, someone whose five-hundred-word journey from easy to hard passes through a language homeland that may be foreign to some of our contestants. For me to be here at all, drawing kids into battle to see who drops and who survives, in a game that allies itself with school but might not be about learning, I must convince—or delude—myself that skill will prevail over luck, that desire and engagement, and most of all, knowing and loving words, impels our eventual winners. And I must select and construct our list in the image of our ethnic, cultural, and literary borderland.

In our standard setup, no matter which auditorium we have borrowed from a local high school or the university, I face the spellers from a wooden podium positioned between the stage and the first row of spectators’ seats. On stage, two adjustable-height microphones about twenty feet apart wait for the contestants. At a table next to me, the four judges sit in folding chairs also facing the children, each with a couple of sharpened yellow pencils and a black loose-leaf notebook full of the words I have selected and arranged. A big Webster’s dictionary further crowds the table, along with a cassette tape recorder we will use to record the proceedings. We might need these recordings to resolve a challenge from a teacher or parent who disagrees with the ding of the judges’ small brass bell, our old-fashioned means of announcing that the contestant has misspelled a word. “Appeals may be filed,” the rules state, “by a parent, legal guardian, or teacher of the speller who is seeking reinstatement in the contest. The deadline for filing an appeal is before the speller affected would have received his/her next word had he/she stayed in the competition.”
    When the 2002 competitors are settled on stage, the welcomes spoken, and the rules read, I call the children forward one by one to say name and school and to practice speaking into the microphone. We start out trying to keep one microphone raised and the other one lowered so that the children can self-select based on their height. But most remain inattentive to this possibility, so we just wait out the endless adjusting. I tell some who insist on standing back from the head of the mike, “Pretend it’s an ice cream cone you’re just about to lick. That’s how close you need to be for us to hear you.” Even so, I have to coax voices out of nervous mouths. I tell several of them to take two deep breaths and start over. Not shy, the eight-year-old speaks right up, so quickly and loudly that the audience laughs. Then I give each one a word from the just-for-practice list I have put together, simple fourand five-letter words, like best, milk, part. Even though I have told them it is OK to miss a word in this rehearsal, no one does. But as the practice round progresses, we find the sound system in this borrowed auditorium barely adequate. No loudspeaker faces the kids, so they have to hear me—and themselves—through speakers that face the audience. They ask me to repeat words, and I find myself spitting final consonants into the microphone.

Each year, in the weeks before the bee, I use the master word bank to make up lists of about seventy words each for the first two official rounds. We get champions from schools that top out at grade five as well as from grades-six-through-eight middle schools that usually produce our winners. I try to start off gently enough to let the younger kids go two rounds in front of the family and teachers who have come to cheer them on. I have learned to arrive with more words than kids in case I need to do further list editing in the heat of the action. On occasion I haven’t noticed ahead of time that the word has a near homonym or have failed to spot a misleading ambiguity in a sentence. This word surplus also allows the other judges to cross out a word if they find a problem I have overlooked.
    For fear that some of our spellers’ parents have laid hands on our word source, I avoid using any prepared list in its original form, scrambling the words within their difficulty levels to prevent any prediction. Over the years I have been doing this, I have stretched well beyond the modest word-removal and sentence tweaking of my rookie year to all-out surgical reconstruction of the lists. My dining room serves as operating theater, the long table covered with pages of words. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, sits nearby in case I need to select a different definition from one provided by our anonymous listmaker. I cut the lists into strips, each one containing a single word and its associated material. For the early rounds, I select and reorder ones that challenge without being outlandish, words that excellent fourthand fifth-grade readers have probably encountered.

Now, in late January of 2002, assembling my firstand second-round lists, I find a more common definition for talent and compose a sentence that showcases this meaning. I reject torpid, lux, and pre-engagement and then remove my favorite wrong word of the entire list: wafflestomper. This word for lug-soled shoes had its fifteen minutes about thirty years ago. It is not even that difficult to spell—it is just plain ridiculous. I look up and enter more common definitions for pocket, foil, host, platter, and permit (the noun), then rewrite the sentences to match. I revise another sentence because Prairie Home Companion is not in the listening repertoire of our contestants. Garrison Who? I toss out skyjacking as just wrong for early 2002.
    The first year I did this, I discovered an unsettling pattern in the sentences that came along with the word list and learned forevermore to be on my guard. In that year’s word bank, boys far outnumbered girls in acting, doing, fixing, while girls watched, felt, suffered. I found myself switching “Robert” to “Alicia” and vice versa in these sentences, wanting Alicia to test a model rocket and Robert to feel pain at being left out of a group of friends. That particular undertone has not infected our lists in the years since. The kids who come to our county bee are white, Latino, Native American, African American, Asian American, rich, poor, and in between. I remain vigilant for trends in word choice or sentences that wrongly suppose a shared culture, religion, or set of experiences.
    However peculiar it may seem, I resolve some of my ambivalence about the virtuoso sport of stand-up spelling by appointing myself guardian of democracy and fairness. Stand-up spelling at any level is a contrivance, an odd combination of language ability, performance skill, and competitive drive that probably benefits the world no more than the ability to twirl a fire baton. While good spelling can be helpful in life, it is not critical to success in most fields, and the stand-up version recalls an idealized past in which recitation was mistaken for learning. By the beginning of our current century, the National Spelling Bee has evolved into an extreme sport, broadcast on ESPN, its end-of-childhood athletes coached, polished, overstuffed with words most of us have never heard before. Reality TV.
    So our kinder, gentler bee remains a throwback. This contest isn’t about spelling words like grallatorial, inconcinnity, staurolatry, all of which appeared at the 1999 national finals. The first time I saw—never mind heard—any of these words was when I ran across them the following year in a study booklet published by the newspaper chain that sponsors the annual event in Washington, D.C. Kids win our county competition with words that most college-educated people have heard or read even if they themselves could not stand up and spell them out. I rationalize that our contest is like the local Little League All Stars—still about kids and families having fun. And I admit clinging to some of the pride that comes from an old and singular accomplishment, doing something that I am good at even as I label it quasi-educational and challenge its significance. My two or three hours with the spellers each year pass quickly, offer no opportunity to form relationships, probe feelings, find out which ones are pushed by parents and which by personal inclination and sheer talent. And not being the one who meets them when the bell sends them offstage, I don’t see their tears or hear the self-reproach.

We go on to the first “real” round, and even with the unreliable sound system, most of the kids make it through. Theo, a fourth grader whose family I know, falls on garter, despite my reading him the definition and a sentence to help him distinguish it from its near homonym guarder. He goes for the homonym anyway and slumps away to stage left when the judge’s bell rings. Worried that my words are drowning in the sound system’s distortion, I start offering definitions and sentences without being asked. In round two, the slight increase in word difficulty costs twenty more of our contestants their chance to go on. In my focus on pronouncing audibly and clearly, I miss noticing whether these twenty who go out smile bravely or hold back tears, whether they glare at me or look out to the audience for a sympathetic parent’s face. When we complete the round, I call for the fifteen-minute break I have planned, knowing that the preliminaries, the practice round, and rounds one and two take about an hour and a half. Some of the kids who missed their firstor second-round word now leave with their parents, while others stay to see what will happen. We still have thirty-some kids who will be coming back when we resume at 2:45. During the break I speak briefly with Carlton, the boy I knew back when he was younger. He tells me his parents couldn’t come, that his older brother drove him. I can’t tell if this is OK with him, and he shrugs when I wish him luck.
    I am here as Pronouncer partly because, after my win at county, my mom wanted to coach me for state, and I actually let her do this. Neither one of us has ever been particularly competitive, so I still don’t know what got into us. As a natural speller who had never once studied for a spelling test and each time got 100 percent, I had always been able to call words up from some deep well filled by insatiable reading. A slight hearing impairment in childhood may have helped me focus the visual attention needed to be an early, and then addicted, reader. But in late March and early April of 1960, for an hour or more each day, we studied lists and, more importantly, learned rules, generalizations, and how Latin, Greek, French, and German all play a part in English spelling. We found that the -ble syllable of a word was more likely to be spelled -ible than -able if the root could also be combined into a word ending in -ion, like corrosion and corrodible. While not an absolute rule, it reflected one of the many probabilities that govern English spelling. Later on, when I did graduate work in language education, I found that we had done a good job covering these regularities.

Working on my lists in the weeks before the 2002 bee, I examine a more advanced part of the master list, utilizing a new standard. In the third round we start to learn which children can really spell and which ones just happened to do better than the other kids on the day of their school bees. So I start applying my best idea of eighth-grade reading level, knowing that this will not exclude the advanced readers and spellers among our elementary school kids and that it will weed out middle-schoolers who got here more by luck than skill.
    But now a trend in my word bank unsettles me: too many of the words have a religious meaning, connotation, or application with a subtle partiality for church-going Christianity. I keep seeing bishops, cathedrals, and the like in the sentences, which isn’t in and of itself a problem, but the sentences relating to Christianity assume a comfortable familiarity on the part of the speller, while words from Jewish or Hindu sources suggest exotic differences: “In the back of the room sat a bearded man wearing a black skullcap and reading a book.” I pull revelation, cathedral, sacred, theology, and sermon. “Randy thought that the minister’s sermon was less interesting than usual and worked hard to pay attention,” only works if you have been in church and know its language firsthand. Its reference calls on the speller’s life experience rather than on her reading experience. Then I waver over potion. Harry Potter has helped put this into the reading vocabulary of most third graders, and I could consider kicking it back into the first round. It stays in the “maybe” pile until I find telepathic, and then sorcerer, astrologer, sinistral, and necromancy later on. I decide to remove these along with potion to avoid possible offense to the religiously conservative.
    As I select and discard words for the next few rounds, I look for words that challenge most fourteen-year-olds yet are familiar—even if not easy to spell—to a reading adult. It is hard to assess this with precision because the children in this bee generally read ahead of their peers. These top spellers know basic structural elements of English either intuitively or through paying attention in school. Having some knowledge of Greek derivation clues them to use phor -kin the right place. Visual memory will come through to cue whether the middle consonant sound in platter is represented by -tt- or -dd-. In this part of the bee we find out who really understands spelling.
    The experts believe that excellent spellers can recollect a visual image from their reading experience and that they have formed intuitions and concepts of the ways in which the words of their language are constructed and not constructed. To win at stand-up spelling, you have to be able to maintain a dynamic match between your mind’s-eye memory for the word and the sequence of letter names coming out of your mouth, with no backtracking to self-correct.
    As I work on the list, I remove more words from this central section: pueblo goes because it is too easy for children in our southwestern city. Ditto tortoise, from second-grade science. Too bad these weren’t on the easier list. And additional religious words go: apostate, martyr, vicarage, pulpitry. The inclusion of this last word floors me. A specialized word, but not all that hard to spell if it is in your working vocabulary, its definition (“preaching”) and its sentence (“Reverend Watson was writing a book on the art of pulpitry”) do nothing to clarify meaning for someone who prays in a mosque or synagogue. Puppetry would have been a much better word, and equally challenging. I don’t believe that these churchy words appear in the reading material of an advanced eighth grader, unless she is studying about Christian subjects. For me, the one who gets to be in charge of the list, that is not acceptable. Next I slice away novice, because its sentence uses a religious application; pandit, because I am throwing out everyone else’s religious words; then kittel and orthodox, because their sentences refer to Jewish appearance, implying oddness. For good measure I get rid of Mesopotamian and patriarch as well.
    Some zealous list memorizers stay alive farther into the bee than their everyday spelling ability warrants, but to win, to make it to state, a child needs to grasp underlying principles of English word construction and derivation. Now I examine each word for the elements that cue conscious and knowledgeable spellers, but which might go right over the heads of the memorizers and their near relatives, those who over-apply simple phonics strategies. Superficial letter-sound relationships can be useful for reading but lead to trouble when we spell: the letter f, for example, stands reliably as -fff- when we read it, but when we want to spell that same -fff- in phantom, we have to know more about this word than just its beginning sound.

Twenty-six spellers remain in the contest as round four begins, but only three of the first ten get their words right. I hope I haven’t increased the difficulty level too fast in my word selections, though I can do nothing about it at this point. My former student Carlton, the one whose parents didn’t come today, goes down on a word he should have known, a word he might have gotten if he had let his family know this was important, if he himself had arrived that day with desire and intention. I remember him as more passionate than this, and again I wonder what has happened.
    By the time the bell has rung five of our spellers down from the stage, a polite mother comes forward to challenge the judgment that her daughter has misspelled immobilize. The child has added a final d. While we are beginning to sort this one out, a father appeals our finding that his son, the second speller in the round, got diatribe wrong. All of the judges heard him say v where the b should have been, suggesting that our speller was not familiar with this word and was making a relatively good guess, but no cigar. Considering the sound system, we interrupt the round for the ten minutes it takes to sort all of this out. After listening to the tape several times, we deny the appeal on diatribe and accept the one on immobilize. Despite my best pronouncer’s effort to overcome the fuzz from the speakers, our speller has heard the word as immobilized, and that is what she spelled. The girl, a white-bloused, glasses-wearing stereotype of the Good Student, smiles broadly as she climbs up to the stage and sits back down. The remaining audience seems satisfied with these decisions, and we move on.
    Agribusiness stumps another of our round four contestants, while the next speller finds success with sustenance. In this round I have listed begonia, proficiency, lintel, attrition, all containing the pesky schwa sound, that uh that we say in a syllable that is not accented, no matter what vowel letter is used to spell it. Our spellers get begonia and proficiency and go down on the other two. The misspellings of lintel and attrition aren’t even near misses, making me think that the girls haven’t encountered these words anywhere at all before this moment. Too late now, but I hope I haven’t overestimated the precocious eighth grader’s reading vocabulary.

Back in January, making my round five list from a more advanced category within my collection, I find words whose spellings seem a crazy mix of easier and harder. Many strike me as not so tough to spell when you hear the definition, but still outside the experience of my hypothetical advanced reader: abatement, cryptanalysis. I balance these choices with words from the same section that have more familiar meanings but trickier spellings, like accommodating and terrarium. I apply my language teacher’s intuition, throwing out words that are problematic to spell and beyond the reading vocabulary of the advanced eighth grader, or both too familiar and too predictable. I give up one of my two Chinese derived words, Taoism, because of my rule about religious words. The same for my only Sanskrit word, mandala. From Middle English I leave in japery and tawdrily. I reject the Latin-derived corporeal and the Greek phlegmatic because I think they are too easy for this section of the bee. And the sentence for corporeal is faintly sexist and doesn’t provide a useful context: “It’s very difficult for Jennifer to think in a corporeal way.” The truth, that there is no reliable science to this selection process, leaves me uneasy, and the luck of the draw stalks all of my best intentions to assemble a genuinely just and fair list. But I will do my best. Last, I drop hoydenish because its sentence makes me grimace: “Neal felt that even the most ardent feminist would regard Tiffany’s behavior as hoydenish.” Its essentially negative gender reference makes me wonder how on earth it could have been put on the list at all.
    It was down to the final two of us at our 1960 state bee. I spelled the word blowzy correctly after the other kid missed it. If that word showed up on a list today, it would follow hoydenish into the trash and for exactly the same reasons. Untidy, disheveled, slovenly, the dictionary says, almost always referring to a woman. When I spelled the next word correctly—bombardier—I was the champion, headed for national.

The twelve children remaining at the beginning of the fifth round regroup across the front row of chairs on stage. The first five get their words right: investiture, circumambient, chassis, terrarium, opaline. Aristocracy and corrodible trip up the next two contestants. Suddenly, at the end of round six, we have our top three: two eighth-grade boys who were here last year, Steven and Daniel, and an eager sixth grader named Trevor. Steven is the boy with the robots-in-space book and the intense eyes who declared his goal before we started today. Like him, Daniel is tall and filled out for his age. Trevor shows his confidence by standing up straight and keeping his voice firm. None of the three hesitates or stalls like some of the kids who have dropped away, so I have the quick thought that it could take all night for these three experts to wear each other out. In round seven all three spell their words correctly: contrarily, jealousy, condescension. They move smoothly through round eight: volition, smithereens, onslaught. Then suddenly, round nine yields a winner as Steven spells exasperated correctly, while his fellow finalists both go down, unfamiliar with debacle and panoply. Steven widens his eyes in pride and pleasure, smiling just a little and very discreetly pumping his fist, but no outburst. After a quick round of applause, our attention shifts to the other two, because now we have a situation to resolve: our rules don’t tell us how to break a tie for second place, and only one of these boys can go to state with Steven.
    At check-in, each child draws a number that determines order of seating and spelling. The rules suggest that in case of a tie, the speller with the higher contestant number will be declared the winner of the tie. When we announce this, conversational buzz from the audience signals their discomfort. Trevor’s and Daniel’s parents approach the judges’ table. Three of the judges and our county staff liaison are running the bee for the first time. The senior judge, Skip, and I hear one of the parents point out that the contestants didn’t blindly draw numbers at check-in, but some managed to fish around in the jar until they pulled the jersey number of a favorite sports hero. We have fought an inadequate sound system all afternoon, and now the rules don’t offer guidance that makes sense to us. Yes, these two kids tied, but should the good or bad luck of a draw determine which one goes to state? I suspect that the audience’s sense of fair play will outweigh a controversial interpretation of rules. So we punt.
    While technically I am not in charge of interpreting and enforcing the rules, I have a little seniority in this situation. Skip and I persuade the three novice judges to let us proceed with a spell-off. The audience applauds when I announce this. Cheerful and patient in victory, Steven sits with his parents in the front row of spectator seats, happy to wait through this delay for the presentation of trophies.
    Sixth-grader Trevor and eighth-grader Daniel take their places on the stage for this face off. Like Steven, Daniel spoke to me earlier this afternoon about his dream of going to state. Now he stands up to the mike and misspells the 237th word of the bee, corgi. He seems to have heard the word before and knows that it refers to a dog, but he puts an e on the end. Skip rings his bell, and Daniel squinches up his face and sits back down in his chair to see if Trevor will manage to spell it. Trevor misspells it in another way, and they remain tied. Trevor shakes his head a couple of times as if to reorganize his brain. In the next round, they spell desecration and acquisition flawlessly and do the same through seven more quick rounds: refurbish, paraphrasable, feckless, astringent, guffaw, crescendo, harmonize, insipid, turbine, snivel, shrapnel, relevancy, bamboozle, brontophobia.
    In round nineteen, Trevor trips on discrepancy. He grimaces and clenches his jaw all at once, waiting with closed eyes while Daniel spells. Daniel gets it right, and then goes on to spell demeanor, securing his place in the state contest. He grins broadly and starts to wave his arm, then reins himself in when he sees Trevor’s disappointment. But no tears from Trevor, even though he would have gotten the trip to state if we had strictly followed the rules about contestant numbers.
    After the county schools superintendent has given the boys their trophies, I pose for photos with Steven and Daniel, offer my wishes for success to the two boys’ parents, gather up my papers, and speak briefly with a reporter. I would be thrilled if someday one of my county winners followed in my footsteps and made it to national, but recent state winners have been ready for prime time in a way our local kids have not. I keep a list of especially hard words for the time one of those super-competitive spelling performers shows up at my bee, but I have never had to use it. Neither Steven nor Daniel, nor Trevor the year after, followed me to the national bee, even though their spelling skill now pretty well matches what mine was back then. This parity allows us to remain kin in something both more abstract and, to me, more fundamental than gathering firsts along an increasingly narrow path. Or at least it lets me reassure myself that we remain in some normal “smart kid” realm, comfortably distant from the pressure-filled stratosphere of the national bee and its pumped-up robot-kids.
    Being Pronouncer for a few weeks and one day each year, I shove aside my adult opinions, guilt, and unease about the ultimate importance of spelling and give in to a selfish emotion: I love words, words in books, words in lists, words in dictionaries, words in puzzles. Insufficiently sensitive to these boy-winners’ disappointment at losing in the statewide competition, I want only to count them into the eccentric circle of us who love words both in their accumulation and in their particularity. In the best of futures, I will see them, names unrecalled, alongside me, scanning a library shelf or bookstore display. Each one will just see a short and faintly familiar older woman looking from the books to his face and back again, smiling.

When I missed the word flocculent on the afternoon of the first day of the 1960 National Spelling Bee, my mother was crushed because we had, for sure, practiced that word. I forgot or otherwise failed to put in the second c. I reported in my journal that I sat in the balcony the next morning and watched the finals with new friends who had also misspelled their way out on the first day. My journal notes, “The pronouncer was very nice, and that helped a lot.”

Caroline Tompkins lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she continues to volunteer as the pronouncer of the Pima County Spelling Bee. She is completing a dark-tinged memoir about her years as an elementary school principal. ‘‘Spelling Bee’’ is her first published essay.

“Spelling Bee” appears in our Autumn 2004 issue.