I kind of did that accidentally.
Here’s what happened:
Victoria loves to spell. She got
a taste of spelling victory last year, when she won top 6th grade
speller, and it gave her a thirst for spelling victory. This year, when the spelling bee came around,
she had me drill her on words to be ready for it.
And drill we did.
There was a big long word list, and we spent a lot of time going over it
and getting the hard words down and preparing for the county bee (there were 18
kids from her school going). It must
have been an hour a night we spent drilling, even on weekends, and I gave her
extra assignments to write out words she struggled with and read and re-read
the word list and everything. But she
worked hard and did a great job of preparing herself.
When the Bee day arrived, she was ready and focused. Eye of the tiger.
“Victoria!” I said.
“What is best in life?”
“To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and
to hear the lamentations of their parents!”
“Yes!” I
laughed. And off she went.
When she got on the bus with the rest of the kids from her
school, she discovered that many of them hadn’t even looked at the word
list. Ever. “You’ll never win!” one kid said. “You’ve got no chance!”
“We’ll see,” she said.
Now back in my day, we used to do just the verbal rounds,
and if you got a word wrong you were out.
Which is why I went out on the word “Lemonade.” Because I spelled it “Lemonaide” like you see
in the supermarket. Stupid
advertisements.
Anyhoo, now what they do is a 25-word written round, with
the top 20 or so students advancing to the oral round, where they each get 10
words. And whoever scores the highest
out of the 10 is the winner, and the top 3 advance to state.
Lo and behold, she gets all 25 words right. She’s thrilled. Hooray!
But that’s not what she came for.
She came to win the whole shebang, and she’s just getting started.
You could tell a lot of these kids were nervous, and rightly
so. Here they are, speaking into a mike
in an auditorium spelling for their lives.
But not her. She’s calm, cool,
and collected. I was actually worried,
as pride goeth before the fall and whatnot.
The first two rounds of the orals go pretty predictably, and
there’s no real drama. But on the third
word, she gets “hors d’oeuvre.”
“Hors d’oeuvre?” she asks excitedly. “Hors d’oeuvre! H-O-R-S space
D-apostrophe-O-E-U-V-R-E Hors d’oeuvre!”
Then she sticks the microphone into the rib of the kid next
to her and sits down, grinning. You
could have heard a pin drop. The other
kids are all looking at her, horrified, mouths hanging open, and she just nods.
It all went downhill from there. The poor kid next to her started just
whispering his answers and eventually crumbled.
After each round they’d start asking her if they spelled their word
right or not, and she’d tell them. As
she picked up speed she just got more and more calm, rolling off words without
any hesitation.
You know how kids buy time by asking about word origin and
definition and whatnot? Yeah, not
her. She’s just rattling off these
words, and it’s just making the other kids around her more and more
deflated. By round eight, they’d all
pretty much conceded the bee to her and were fighting for second place.
I didn’t know whether to be disheartened for them, elated
for her, or start writing out the “you need to be nicer to those around you”
talk with her.
Finally, mercifully, the bee was over and she was crowned
victor. Those kids went staggering out
of there with shell-shock, eyes glazed over.
She tried to be humble (and failed), smiling and graciously thanking
everyone for their congratulations, but I could see it in her eyes: she wanted
that state trophy.
She wanted it bad."I think I'd like to take a few days off," she told me. "Then we start again. I want that state trophy!"
No comments:
Post a Comment