Spelling Bee - August 11, 2012

I have a chance to win $5,000 on August 11 - that's the day of the AARP spelling bee here in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

I decided to sign up after going through a few of the words on the bee's sign up page - they're spelled phonetically and you have to type in the actual spelling, and it tells you if you're wrong or not. SO they were all easy and I got them all right, so I thought, "heck, I'll go for it."

So I gout out my credit card and sent in my $40 fee.

Then I came across the links to the PDFs of teh 2011 and 2010 spelling bees. The bee is in two parts - several rounds where you apparently write down the words, and then everyone who gets past those rounds goes to the Oral rounds.

And once again the writing down rounds had easy words. And my heart was singing. Then I got to the Oral rounds, and my heart fell to my toes. Not a single recognizable word.

I'd intended to go through the Scrabble dictionary from now until August 10, but now I'm thinking I'll have to abandon that and go with an actual dictionary instead, because most of those words were much longer than the 9 letter words in a Scrabble dictionary.

But $5,000 is nothing to sneeze at. I will have no problem with the easy words - college level English. IT's the hard words - the chemistry and scientific words, etc., that I've got to start studying.

Also there will be the nervousness factor. I assume that if I make it to the Oral rounds, those will be held with us standing up in front of microphones, in front of an audience, with no ability to write a word down to see if it "looks right" - we'll have to spell it right the first time.

And hopefully I won't get nervous and "choke."

I had expected the spelling bee to be easier than the Scrabble tournament. After all, a great deal of winning at Scrabble is luck - getting the right tiles throughout the entire game. Whereas at a spelling bee, it's just your knowledge that comes into play.

But they've just got to use these words that no one has ever heard of, just like in Scrabble. That's so stupid, IMHO. There are thousands of hard-to-spell words that people would use in their day-to-day lives, that it would make sense for them to learn, to make learning them for a spelling bee worthwhile. Instead we have to learn these multi-syllabic words that we'll never use anywhere else than in a spelling bee!

Ah, well. The die has cast. The money has been sent. I'll have to do my best!