The Spelling Bee Kids Transcript
MIGNON: Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and today, in honor of Bee Week, I have an interview with Shalini Shankar, a professor of anthropology and Asian American studies at Northwestern University and the author of “Beeline,” a new book about kids who participate in the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
Hi, Shalini. Thanks for being here with me today.
SHALINI: Thank you so much for inviting me to be on your amazing podcast.
MIGNON: Well, when I heard about your book, “Beeline,” about kids in the spelling bee, I knew I had to talk to you. That just sounds amazing. So tell me how you got the idea to write this interesting book.
SHALINI: Well, it was kind of a culmination of a few different areas of interest of mine. One being language. I’m a linguistic anthropologist, so I’ve always been interested in language and culture, but as well I study South Asians in the United States, and Indian American kids had been winning the spelling bee for seven or eight years straight when I started looking at this. So it was a really nice convergence of a number of interests for me.
MIGNON: And my understanding is you did an awful lot of research for the book.
So tell me about the time you spent with the kids and at the bee and just sort of how, how you went about gathering your information.
SHALINI: Sure. So I started to go to the National Spelling Bee in 2013, and I went every year through 2018, and I do plan to go in a couple of weeks as well, of course, that won’t be in the book, but I interviewed spellers and their families. I interviewed people who work for Scripps at the bee. And I also observed a lot of what ESPN does there to create speller profiles and, and telecast the event.
MIGNON: Yeah. It’s become this amazing big thing in the last, you know, since I’ve been aware of it. Now it’s on ESPN, and it’s almost like the Olympics where they have the profiles of the kids. Did you find, did the kids love that or did it make them nervous. How did how did that all go behind the scenes.
SHALINI: I mean I think a little of both. I think most kids at least the first time they went into that ESPN studio which is onsite in one of the back hallways of the place where they hold the National Spelling Bee in National Harbor. I think they’re a little intimidated by the number of cameras and props and they have a whole set that, that they want to do different, that they want to have the kids do different things, and but they very quickly relax, and many of them just love it. And the idea of being on ESPN is a huge draw for a lot of them.
MIGNON: Hmm. And I would imagine that the kids who can not be nervous, you know, with all that going on around them have a big advantage compared to the other kids. Do they do some of them practice somehow, you know, with their meat I mean it’s such a big deal. Do they have media trainers now, or is it just sort of the luck of the draw of who can cope with that.
SHALINI: You know, they don’t have media trainers as far as I know but, and it’s really something that kids themselves work on over the years and more than being media ready for ESPN, they’re much more concerned about being on that stage with all the lights and people and knowing that they’re on, you know, that they’re being broadcast, so they really have to work on their focus and their stage time. And that’s something that they really try to, kind of, figure out what do I need to do to stay calm in this situation.
MIGNON: So how do they practice? Do they do practice spelling bees, or how do they get ready?
SHALINI: Yes, some of them do practice spelling bees, and a lot of them do like little fun informal the bees on Facebook or using some sort of, like, Messenger app, but a lot of them just spend a lot of time studying and they’re really kind of, they learn from each other or how to stay focused on stage, and I think they just kind of click into something. The pronouncer of the National Spelling Bee, Dr. Jacques Bailly, is the 1980 champion, and in my view, he has the most calming soothing demeanor. And when I spoke to him, he went out of his way to tell me how much he’s really rooting for the spellers. And so he, you know, he is a really nice rapport with the spellers, and I think that calms them a bit as well.
MIGNON: Yeah, bringing up the pronouncer reminded me of a question I got from a listener named Trent Armstrong. He wanted to know where the funny, ridiculous sentences come from that the pronouncers used when they’re giving the kids examples. Do you know?
SHALINI: Yeah, that’s a great question. So several years ago the bee began to hire comedy writers, and so they, but because the word lists are so top secret, they have to fly in the writers. And so the writers are writing the sentences four or five words ahead of when they’re being used in the competition on site in the same building as the National Spelling Bee. So…
MIGNON: Oh my gosh!
SHALINI: Yeah, they really have to think fast on their feet. And so the things they come up with, if you think about the fact that they’re doing them right on the spot, it’s even more impressive.
MIGNON: Oh, that’s amazing that it’s so, so short beforehand. That’s amazing.
SHALINI: Yes.
MIGNON: Going back, going back so I would like to talk more though about how the kids prepare. So they don’t do media training so much, but they do some practice spelling bees but I imagine they must spend hours and hours every day every week. How much are most of them practicing and how do they practice?
SHALINI: They really do spend an inordinate amount of their childhood doing this if they want to become an elite speller. And the term “elite speller” kind of emerges from that, the spelling bee world. A lot of these kids realize that they want to develop spelling careers because they really love this. And over the years, they start to add to the amount of time they spend on it. So initially maybe they’ve studied, you know, a couple of hours a week and they realized like oh this isn’t going to be enough if I actually want to move past my school or my district into the the regional or whatever level it is that will get them to the national level. So they start adding on time, and so by the end, by the time that you see the kids who are in the championship round, they’re spending maybe, you know, three or four hours a day during the week and all weekend studying and sometimes…
MIGNON: Wow.
SHALINI: Yeah. And sometimes it’s before school like they’ll get up at 4:00 in the morning to start studying and then continue after school because they’ve also got a full slate of other activities. And so in my book I look at the spelling bee community, but I also focus on some of the South Asian American spellers, and they have their own quote unquote “Minor League circuit.” And that’s really interesting too because that extends what they call “bee season” well into the summer.
MIGNON: Huh. Are most of them bilingual or no?
SHALINI: A lot of them have passive competence in their heritage language. They might be…or and a handful are active bilinguals, but it seemed to me that because they most of them are in households where English is the predominant language spoken, they say they hear their parents speaking their heritage language, and they can usually understand it well, but I I, it varies whether they can actually speak it themselves.
MIGNON: Yeah, yeah. Tell me more about the parents actually. I’m sure that’s interesting.
SHALINI: It is. So these parents are primarily from what we would call Generation X. They’re usually born between 1965 and 1980. Of course, there’s some variance there. They’re certainly Millennial parents who also bring their kids to the bee. But a lot of these parents have, kind of, taken a slightly different approach to parenting than the kind of baby boomer helicopter parents. So these parents are involved in their kids lives, but they’re not trying to micromanage everything. And so one of the things I observed is that a lot of times parents will try to get their kids to develop certain kinds of studies skills that they can implement themselves rather than kind of driving every minute of the process and overseeing it with a really heavy hand. And then this ends up benefiting a lot of these kids because they understand time management and they do develop some diligence and focus and that sort of thing. And this is especially true of the South Asian American parents that I met. Many of them are non U.S. born. You know, they were born in India. They immigrated as adults. Wo they bring this kind of hyper focused awareness about education and an educational or enrichment to this that really I think those kids are especially attuned to the importance of sitting for long periods of time and doing this. If this is where they, if they want to make it to a national stage they understand that this is what needs to happen.
MIGNON: And so the kids. This is a big part of their life. Do they have sort of a culture around it. Maybe or in a language that they use about their spelling life.
SHALINI: They do. They often create various lexical terms to use as they are moving through the spelling bee world. “Spellebrity” is one of them, which is a portmanteau of “spelling” and “celebrity.” They have “spellfies” instead of selfies where they’re taking photographs and various other terms that they, that they really share among themselves.
MIGNON: And do they keep in touch with the friends they make while they’re there? Do they tend to keep in touch?
SHALINI: Oh, absolutely, and it’s become so much easier with social media, but I’ve heard even spellers from 20 years ago before social media was so widely available, that they still find one another and keep in touch, and a lot of spellers go back to the bee each year just to watch and just to reconnect with one another.
MIGNON: That’s so cool.
SHALINI: Yes it is.
MIGNON: OK. Well we’re going to take a quick break for our sponsors. But when we come back, I want to talk about what you mean by “having a spelling career,” and I’d love to hear what surprised you most in your research. So we’ll be right back.
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OK. And we’re back. Thank you so much again for being here. Earlier you mentioned something about the kids having spelling careers, and I know that you’ve been following some of these kids for quite a long time, so I am really curious you know when, you know, five 10 years later are they glad they did it? Would it…what is it? How many of them are still involved in the spelling bee world, and what you meant by having a spelling career?
SHALINI: Well, it is an odd phrase, right, both because we don’t usually think about children as having careers and rarely do people make a career out of spelling. But this term has kind of taken on in this world because people have really focused so wholeheartedly on preparing for the spelling bee if they want to make it to the evening finals, the ones that are broadcast live on ESPN. And they’re so invested in organizing their childhood around spelling study. So I think this is in part where this idea comes from, and it’s like you learn year after year you build your skillset, you build your credentials, you hope to finish further in the competition each year that you’re able to come back. So between the ages of 6 and 14 is primarily when this happens, but the most of the spellers that I meet at the bee who are considered elite tend to be 12, 13, and 14, you know, kind of toward the end of their spelling career. And what’s really interesting is that these spellers who do really well have increasingly gone into coaching as soon as they have to…as soon as they age out of spelling. So what that means is that you know whereas initially there were, there were a couple of coaching companies and they offered services through either Skype or they worked with students one-on-one. but it was primarily adults. Now kids are actually starting their own coaching services, and they’re doing it on Skype or Facetime or some other platform, and they’re charging a good amount of money for these services, and they’re also able to use all of their ortho graphic and etymological knowledge as a way to make money in their, in their teen years. And it lets them stay connected to this world which they really love.
MIGNON: Mm hmm. So do you find that most of them seem to be glad that they invested so much time into it as they get older?
SHALINI: I think that they realized that the time they spent on it for them feels worthwhile, but it often quickly gets replaced by a focus on some other kind of competition or some other kind of undertaking. So debate team, science fair, or math bowl, some of them go do more dance and other kinds of artistic endeavors, but these are kids who have a lot of interests. So there’s never any regrets. But I…they’re not lingering on the fact that they once were a speller and now don’t know what to do with themselves.
MIGNON: I see. Good. So they tend to be more ambitious or competitive and and able to focus on something.
SHALINI: I think so. I mean these are especially elite kids in general because they are ones that managed to make it to the national level of a competition, which of course is out of reach for most kids out of the over eleven million children who participate in spelling bees in their classrooms. You get about 500 who make it to the national stage. So it’s such a small number of kids as it is. So I think that these kids are kind of focused and driven in a way that maybe the average kid might not be.
MIGNON: Yeah, and you said that you felt like your research gave you an insight into Generation Z in general, sort of how they’re different from the millennials and the Gen Xers.
Can you talk a little bit about sort of your overall impression that you took away from all this.
SHALINI: Yeah, sure. So one of the things that I thought was really interesting about this generation is that they tend to not want participation trophies. They don’t want to be congratulated for showing up somewhere. And of course this is a gross generalization that is applied to millennials. It’s not every millennial is like this by any stretch, but it it more speaks to the culture of parenting as well as kind of the broader societal expectations of what they were like as when they were children and those expectations are shifting. Things have become much more competitive, and I think these kids who are being raised by largely Gen X parents know that. They they work alongside millennials or they’ve seen how hard it’s been for a lot of millennials to enter the job market. So even though these kids are getting really prepared, the expectation that just showing up and working is going to yield something amazing, that expectation has really been tempered. And so I think they are used to things being much more competitive, and they are used to kind of you know not always winning as much. And I think that’s a really interesting shift. Whether you’re a speller or not, you see this in various aspects of kids lives.
MIGNON: And do you think there’s anything about being a recent immigrant or a first generation American that, that makes the kids who do this particularly special or driven? Did you find that that was a factor in their success.
SHALINI: Yeah, definitely. They the kids who do this are a really small subsection of the overall South Asian American population. They tend to be the kids of very well educated immigrants who came in the early 1990s in STEM fields (science technology engineering and math). And these kids are usually…because their parents were so well-educated and their parent that their parents education is really what allowed them to come to this country, they really emphasize that in their own kids lives. So it’s certainly not…there’s nothing genetic about it. There’s nothing like Indian Americans can spell better than anyone else because of their gene pool. But if we look at this sort of cell…the way that this immigrant population self-selected and the fact that they kind of got to settle into communities that had already been established by earlier Indian American immigrants who came post-1965, they had kind of this perfect set of conditions to really come and didn’t just start focusing on various educational activities. And this one really took.
MIGNON: Excellent. And so I’m curious what surprised you the most when you were doing your research for the book and, you know, what really was the biggest surprise.
SHALINI: Well, for me when I…I had only watch the National Spelling Bee on television before I started doing research for the book, and it was shocking to me when I went there how friendly it was and also how much fun people were having because the onstage part was just dramatic and intense and the kids were, you know, very quiet and very focused, but bee week as they call it. This week-long set of events around the national spelling bee that is hosted in National Harbor, it’s based at the same venue where they hold the bee, has all of these different social events and the spellers are really nice to each other. It’s very friendly. So I was really surprised at how intense a competition it was and yet what…how nice and environment it was. It was kind of a rare combination.
MIGNON: Oh, that makes me happy.
SHALINI: Yes, yes. Oh sorry. Can I add one thing?
MIGNON: Yeah.
SHALINI: So what kids say is that they aren’t competing against each other. They’re competing against the dictionary, which I think is a super sweet way to look at it and some of it…I mean at first I thought OK this is ridiculous. But then I kind of understood what they meant both because it’s really about the word they get and whether they know it. Right? So sometimes in a round they’ll know their word but not another word that was given to another speller, so luck does play into it to some degree, so I think that really helps to depersonalize it away from their competitors. And it’s more about them and how they’ve prepared.
MIGNON: Yeah, well, that’s great. And so this…our interview will air right before the bee. So you said you were going again this year, so when you’re watching, what’s your favorite thing to watch for in when you’re, when you’re an observer of the bee?
SHALINI: Well, I’ve sat with past champions. Each year past champions come back to participate in bee week as part of the bee week staff, and one year I was sitting with two champions, and they taught me how to tell if a kid knows a word or not. Or at least to make their best guess as to whether a kid knows their word or not. So I feel as though I’ve been honing my “does this person know their word or not” skills. And so that’s been the most fun for me.
MIGNON: Oh fun. What are some of the tells? Can you share?
SHALINI: Some of the tells are the initial look on their face when they get the word, how long they pause before they repeat it back, and also the ways that they ask their questions. Because most of them at this level will cycle through a certain series of questions regardless of whether they know it. But if they ask certain questions over and over, you kind of get a sense of OK, they know it and they’re just making sure or they really don’t know it and they’re hoping to piece it together with all this information that they’re getting.
MIGNON: Hmm hmm hmm interesting. Well, Shalini, I hope you have a wonderful time at the bee, and thank you so much for being here today. Again the book is “Beeline,” so you can find that where all fine books are sold. And where can people find you online?
SHALINI: People can find me on Twitter at Shalini underscore Shanker or they can find me at Shalini Shankar dot net.
MIGNON: Excellent. Great. Well, have fun at the bee. And thank you again for being here.
SHALINI: Thank you so much for having me.
MIGNON: I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. You can find a complete transcript of this interview in the Grammar Girl section of Quick and Dirty tips.com, and if you like the podcast please subscribe or tell a friend. That’s all. Thanks for listening.