How do you spell stupid? B-E-E

I've commented before that one of my least favorite things is the Little League World Series.  What should be a fun time for kids playing the National pastime has been transformed by adults into an event that generates millions of dollars of revenue (for the adults) and puts awkward pre-teens on national television playing a game that most of them are mediocre at, except for the one kid on each team who shaves, has a wife, and bats .679 with a 0.05 ERA.  What could be worse than adults exploiting young athletes?

Adults exploiting young nerds.

ESPN has, for reasons that escape me, been televising the Scripps National Spelling Bee.  Yes, that annual contest where children are asked to spell words that will never, ever, be used in a sentence by anyone, anywhere.  Children proved their mental superiority and fitness to pass along genetic material by devoting hours of their young lives memorizing the proper spelling of words like bruxellois, hippocrepiform, and iridocyclitis. 

Yeah, that will prepare them for the 21^st century job market.

Look, kids, I hate to break it to you, but there’s this thing called Spell Check.  People no longer need to waste precious moments of life cramming the various ways to spell obscure words into one’s brain.  You might as well be competing in a contest to see who can use an abacus to compute square roots the fastest. 

If this contest taught reasoning skills there might be some minimal value to it, but the fact is that most words in the English language are spelled the way they are because someone, possibly someone not very bright, decided it that way about 800 years ago.  English words are an amalgam of Latin, Germanic, and a rich stew of just about every language that has ever existed on Earth.  You can reason out how a word should be spelled, but the kids who excel at spelling bees got to the top by memorizing the irrational exceptions to the rules, not the rules.

It would also be marginally useful to teach kids how to spell words used in everyday conversation, like “commitment” or “embarrass.”  Both of those are on a list of the 25 most commonly misspelled words (along with, ironically, “misspelled”). But I am pretty sure that any word that anyone would ever encounter is tossed out of the national spelling bee in the first round.

Parents force their kids to waste time committing a medical dictionary to memory instead of playing outside in the fresh air, or learning how to play a musical instrument.  The kids are put under tremendous pressure and no doubt are ridiculed when they embarrass their parents.  ESPN analysts who would rather be covering game 7 of the Stanley Cup Conference Finals are instead talking to some Pakistani immigrant’s child about how he or she was able to spell pyrrhuloxia.

At least the kids participating in the Little League World Series are getting some exercise and developing some eye-hand coordination that will serve them well in other sports if they can’t make it as a baseball player.  The participants in the Scripps National Spelling Bee are just learning that the way to succeed is by memorizing a bunch of useless facts and not questioning whether what they are learning makes sense.  I hope none of them embarrasses themselves.