To Err is Human

Now, I hate to bring this up because I know I’ve made grammatical errors on my blog. Might even make some now. But back in the day, I was a kick ass speller.

My first bee (that’s what we champs call ‘em) was in third grade. And I wasn’t just competing against other eight and nine-year-olds. This was third-fifth grades. And I did okay. Definitely made the top ten.

Then in fourth grade I placed fifth. But still first of the fourth graders. I remember my friend A.J. was so mad when he was eliminated. He stormed off the Cafeteria-Gymnasium-Auditorium stage and ran out of the building. They had to chase after him.

So everyone in the fourth grade knew I was like the spelling queen (hmmm…starting to see why I couldn’t be considered for homecoming queen now.) We would play this game called “Sparkle” where we’d all stand in a circle and go around spelling our spelling words for that week. The deal was that if the person next to you spelled it right, you were out. What’s with these military tactics in fourth grade?

Anyway, when we would go to form the circle, everyone would run away from me. Naturally, at first I thought there was an odor or something. But then I realized that nobody wanted to stand next to me because they KNEW I would spell the word right and they would be out! That was a cool feeling--in a leperish sort of way.

Okay, so that brings us to the fifth grade bee. This was my chance, right? I was like the returning fourth grade champion. So it got down to three of us (A.J. had already been eliminated. Pretty sure he ran out and never returned.)

I got up there and they asked me to spell “Error.” I said, “Um, E…” and then for some reason I made the most critical bee mistake…a rookie mistake, really. I repeated the letter E. So that meant that technically, I spelled the word “E-E-R-R-O-R.” But the worst part is that right after I said the second E, the audience went crazy. I thought they were really rooting for those other two. But more likely they were just glad it was almost over.

That was the year of my big bee ERROR.

But don’t worry, in sixth grade I made my comeback and won the whole thing. You might be thinking, “Yeah, but that’s only against other sixth graders.” True. But we’re dealing with intermediate level words here! We’ve got words like…woah, I just checked the official intermediate spelling bee list for some examples and these words are crazy hard! I’m talking Algorithm, Bourgeois and Extemporaneous.

How did I do it? My dad had started coaching me the summer before sixth grade. We practiced so much that when I won, my dad wasn’t surprised. He gave me a high five and said, “Well, I figured. We practiced enough.”

I did go on to represent my school in the district bee but let’s just say it started at 11am and my mom and I left early enough to make it for lunch at the food court in the mall.

So I’d rather remember the day that I was the spelling queen of Landolt Elementary school. My subjects respected me, admired me, even feared me. Can you believe they don’t give out crowns for this?