2021 spelling bee words full#

And that Black American girls like Avant-garde suffered for it. Lest anyone assume that some kind of modern compulsion to compete, spend or coddle is perverting a once wholesome contest, there’s plenty of evidence that the bee has always highlighted the limits of American meritocracy. She mentions her three spelling tutors, and specific computer programs she used to prep. Many of the kids who make it to the finals have studied with the aid of competitive spelling guides, special computer programs and private coaching that at one popular prep company can total more than $2,000.Īsked about the keys to her historic win, Avant-garde mentions the ability to control her own school schedule she’s homeschooled and blocks out about seven hours each day to study words. It’s now common for spellers to be coached by other past competitors who can charge about $200 an hour for their services, Dhingra says. “You can’t blame parents for playing in a game whose rules they did not create,” says Dhingra, author of Hyper Education: Why Good Schools, Good Grades, and Good Behavior Are Not Enough. The implications are serious for children and the entire society, but the choice is not illogical. Spelling bees have become one of the many extracurricular activities that some parents view as a means to give their children an edge, a way to win admission to the nation’s most prestigious colleges, to internships, to jobs and to the high pay that they hope will follow.

2021 spelling bee words full#

Bees are full of wholesome glory and hard work rewarded, but they are also part of what Pawan Dhingra, a sociologist and professor of American Studies at Amherst College, describes as the nation’s hyper-education ecosystem. Including more students in the world of competitive spelling is a complicated task. Read more: Here’s Every Word That Stumped Spellers During the 2019 Scripps National Spelling Bee “People live in different places, technology is very different… So we are pretty proud of the way we brought that forward.” “It was really important to us, even as we looked at doing this virtually and bringing this up to the full contest in Orlando, that everybody had equal access,” says Durnil, who has spent most of his career working with disadvantaged students. While participation dropped this year by up to a quarter, he says, the pandemic also prompted the organization to dispatch computers and other resources to more than 200 finalists, in an effort to ensure that every child who made it that far could participate in a fair, equal and closely monitored fashion. Michael Durnil, who has served as the bee’s executive director since March. But the pandemic also created opportunities for the contest to evolve, says J. Due to COVID-19, 2020 marked only the first time since World War II that the national spell-off did not occur. Scripps Company and known as the Scripps National Spelling Bee since 1941, has grown from a contest between a few dozen kids to, in 2019, a televised face-off between 562 finalists. I mean, had a little bit of trouble affording it.” The word is “opportunity” “But he said, ‘I didn’t have it because it was way too expensive.’ His family just couldn’t afford it. Like having a book but no pages,” she says. “I can’t even describe what not having SpellPundit is like. She saw an example of that dynamic just recently: an aspiring speller to whom she spoke during a virtual Scripps event told her he didn’t have SpellPundit, a popular prep resource, an annual subscription to which in 2020 cost $600. It takes resources to be competitive, and in a country where the median household incomes for Black and Hispanic families is tens of thousands of dollars lower than those for Asian and white families, some kids are at a disadvantage. She knows, she says, that the paucity of faces that look like hers in the world of competitive spelling isn’t because Black kids don’t want to spell.