JR
was telling me that whenever his wife questions him on the spelling of a word,
he tells her that she shouldn’t doubt him because he was the third grade
all-district spelling bee champion. So, I asked him how that worked, if he had
to go through several levels of competition, being on stage in front of a
microphone, surrounded by an enormous amount of anxiety and pressure. He said
no, that they did it a little differently. It apparently was a written test,
and they graded him by how many words he spelled correctly, and then compared
him to other students in his school and area.
As
we dug into this further, we realized that in order for this to work, they
would have had to have given him a list of the words on a piece of paper and
asked him to spell them. I started laughing, and I asked, “So, basically you
just had to copy the word that you saw in the paper?! I think I know how you
became the third grade all-district spelling bee champion! Are you sure it
wasn’t just a handwriting assignment?” Then another thought hit me. How is it
that everyone else missed the spelling of some of the words if they were handed
to them on a piece of paper?!
