Written by Michael Claxton
The fact that I was an official in the White County Spelling Bee last Friday is one of the great ironies of my life. To explain why, I’ll have to take you back to 1983. I was in the sixth grade at Conyers Middle School, and the time had come for the annual spelling contest. Each homeroom had a competition to select its champion speller, who would go on to the school-wide bee. From there, it was possible to go to the district, then to the state and finally all the way to national glory. For those who dream big, that is.And my homeroom teacher Mrs. Myers did not dream small. She knew how well I had done on all my weekly spelling tests that year, and she smelled a winner. I was not typical champion material: I had no athletic talent, no hand-eye coordination and had somehow managed to get through six grades of school without combing my hair. But I could spell. And each week during vocabulary lessons, when we had to use our newly learned words in a sentence, Mrs. Myers let me read my silly creations to the class. So you can blame her for the fact that I became a humor columnist.Anyway, I could tell that she was mentally dusting off shelf-space for my trophy. But there was a problem. I did not want to participate in the spelling bee. I knew that champion spellers had to memorize long lists of words, had to study French roots and Latin prefixes, and most likely would be asked to comb their hair. I feared that all of this work would interfere with my busy adolescent schedule of watching the “Muppets” and rearranging my “Star Wars” action figures.So when Mrs. Myers started calling out the words for us to write down, I had the sinking feeling that my spelling prowess would doom me to hours and hours of work, not to mention the nerve-wracking experience of spelling in front of an audience. Had I known that, years later, a kid would pass out on national television during the Scripps Spelling Bee in Washington, I would not have been surprised. I had to find away out of all this. A boy’s gotta do what a boy’s gotta do. So I cheated: in reverse. I sabotaged my test and purposefully misspelled half a dozen words. But I was slick about it. I had to make these mistakes look accidental, so I relied on all of my orthographic savvy. So skillfully did I transpose my vowels, so casually did I insert silent H’s, and so craftily did I take advantage of homonyms, that the result was, I must say, a work of masterfully feigned incompetence. The fraudulent answers I handed in were, I thought, undetectable.I still got caught. And worse than that, I was sent to the principal’s office. There I got in trouble for not doing my best. It was embarrassing. I don’t know if you remember being a boy in the sixth grade. Half of you probably don’t. But if a guy has to go to the principal’s office, he wants to go out in a blaze of glory, after starting a food fight or whipping a bully or something. Do you know how lame it is for a sixth-grade male to get sent to the office for not doing his best? My street cred was never the same after that.Fast-forward 20 years. I graduate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a Ph.D. in English, which, if you ask me, confers a pretty solid verdict on my spelling chops. Later that year I come to Harding, where I am placed in charge of several English composition classes and asked to salvage the spelling of America’s future leaders. And then, only a few short years later, I am called upon to be a Pronouncer in the White County Spelling Bee … quite possibly the single highest spelling-related position a person can attain, short of editing the Oxford English Dictionary. If only Mrs. Myers could see me now.While last week’s bee was only slightly less dramatic than the epic 2010 Searcy showdown between two seventh graders that lasted an incredible 44 rounds, it was still a hard- fought contest between several outstanding young spellers. These students had obviously spent long hours preparing and had made sacrifices of time and energy to master an old- fashioned skill that most people lazily rely on computers to correct. Their discipline, poise and confidence were impressive and inspiring. And even though I stood in the spotlight like Alex Trebek – looking smart with the answers right in front of me – these kids actually did what I never had the nerve to do at their age. They refused to hide their talents in the sand, and to them I say B-R-A-V-O.MICHAEL CLAXTON is a guest contributor for the Bison. He may be contacted atmclaxto1@harding.edu
