Inside the elite world of spelling prodigies － by Nancy Foner, NYT May 10, 2019 (Book Review) スペリング・コンテストの内幕(書評)
Beeline: What Spelling Bees Reveal About Generation Z’s New Path to Success
By Shalini Shankar
In the rarefied world of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, Chetan Reddy was not unusual. Like other top spellers in the United States, he prepared constantly. By eighth grade he was putting in at least four hours a day, and as many as eight on weekends. Like other competitors, he began as a youngster, starting in regional bees at around age 6. He is Indian-American, not uncommon in these circles. Chetan did not win the National Bee. He was happy to come in seventh. But the last time the winner was not South Asian was 12 years ago.
Chetan’s parents were not atypical either. They were Indian-American professionals in a Dallas suburb with advanced degrees in electrical engineering and computer science who prepared word lists for him; his mother designed software applications so he could test and review about 1,000 words per hour. “I like the thrill of competition,” Chetan said, “trying to get better and work harder.” To his immigrant father, “the National Spelling Bee was our Olympics.”
Chetan is one of the many junior wordsmiths Shalini Shankar profiles in her engaging book about kids who make it to the competition known familiarly as the Bee. Shankar, an anthropologist at Northwestern University in Illinois, attended many major spelling bees and spent hundreds of hours interviewing and getting to the contestants and their families. The elite spellers have talent, discipline and perseverance. They also have highly invested parents who foster their children’s spelling careers, sometimes at the cost of their own (the upstate New York mother of two Bee champions, Sriram and Jairam Hathwar, for example, cut back on her medical practice), and provide resources, support and guidance every step of the way.
Although Indian immigrants make up about 1 percent of the United States population, their American-born children are overrepresented in the National Spelling Bee finals － and in the book’s profiles. Like other immigrant parents, Indian families highly value education, but they have an additional advantage: An astounding 77 percent of adult Indian immigrants in 2015 had a bachelor’s degree or higher (compared with 29 percent of all immigrants and 31 percent of native-born adults). The Indian-born Bee parents in the book are virtually all professionals with the know-how and financial resources (some of them stay-at-home mothers) to help prepare their children for these intense competitions. There are even two minor-league spelling bees for kids of South Asian heritage that are often a launching pad for the Bee. Less happily, the success of Indian-American spellers has incited some backlash on Twitter, with racist calls for white children to take back the Bee.
Despite the mind-boggling amount of work they did, the kids were enthusiastic about the competitions even when they faltered or failed. Shreyas Parab didn't get to the national semifinals but nonetheless relished his time in the limelight, and was thrilled when he spelled a word right after hours of study (“It's hard to describe the happiness....It's like a victory lap”). If there were spellers who would have preferred to be playing with their friends or resented the pressure, Shankar does not feature them.
Ultimately, the payoff is the excitement and sociability of the bees, the prizes and media attention. And the bees, Shankar argues, helped young people cultivate skills that can be valuable on the job market, create networking opportunities and build poise under pressure, especially for those who become “spellebrities” on ESPN’s live broadcasts of the National Bee, which draw around a million viewers. Being able to spell the longest entry in the dictionary (pneumounoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, a lung disease), like 6-year-old Alash Vukoti, may seem weird, but these parents treat spelling bees much as other American parents treat competitive baseball or soccer, “our brain sport that we encourage.”
The book is much less successful in making the jump from the generally middle-class suburban Bee spellers to revealing truth about an entire generation of people born after 1996. They are “accustomed to competing from a young age,” “work hard to become young social media influencers and entrepreneurs,” “seek out opportunities rather than expecting thing to be handed to them” － these are a just a few of the unsupported generalizations about Generation Z. Shankar is most convincing when writing about the kids and their parents in the culture of the Bee, and how many Indian-Americans have come to call it their own.
