Spelling Bees

This is quite funny, on how hyper competitive Indian parents are.

And I watched a rerun of the spelling bee yesterday. Kavya Shivshankar won the competition. I liked the way she thought about the word, asked all the questions, like what is the language of origin, what is the tense, any alternate pronunciations? and then broke it down and patiently finger wrote each word and then said it aloud.

More here from the Washington Post.

And here's a more gushing post by the Kansas Star.

Tenacity, discipline and diligence aren’t the toughest words to spell, but they all describe Olathe eighth-grader Kavya Shivashankar.

The three-time top-10 finisher in the Scripps National Spelling Bee Championship aced 40 words and bested 292 competitors to claim the winning trophy before a national TV audience Thursday night in Washington, D.C.

The 13-year-old champion from California Trail Junior High School spent years studying the pronunciations, meanings and roots of the dictionary’s most convoluted words.

Kavya’s success stands as a tribute to perseverance, and also to the support of her father and coach, Mirle Shivashankar.

The spelling bee started in 1925 as a way to help students improve their spelling and boost their vocabularies. It has evolved into a part academic competition/part curiosity in which children 13 and younger handle words like laodicean —Kavya’s winning 16th-round challenge. (It means to be indifferent in religion.)

Kavya may run across another of the words she spelled correctly — phoresy, a symbiotic relationship involving transportation by organisms of different species — if she pursues her career goal of becoming a neurosurgeon.

The spelling bee’s winnings, including $30,000 in cash and a $5,000 scholarship, will also help with that.

Congratulations, Kavya Shivashankar. Well done!