The Spelling Bee and Other Worthless Championships

 No kid should ever spend a minute watching the Spelling Bee contest, leave alone bother to spend days, months and years of valuable time practicing for it.

There are more foolish contests in this world, but I am hard pressed to name one.

But why, Sanjiv?

The Spelling Bee teaches you all the wrong skills, namely memorizing meaningless strings of letters that form words. Nobody needs this skill. As I type this essay about this infernal contest, I make spelling errors galore. And yet, the editor fixes them on its own – for the most part. There is nothing to fix the words or the (lack of!) thought that went into them.

Spelling is a worthless skill. You may as well teach your kids the fine art of stenography or how to become a telephone operator.

There is a good reason why kids with Indian origins have won the last 11 Spelling Bee contests. Their parents went to school in India and learnt the art of learning worthless skills. One of these is rote memorization of strings of letters that form meaningless words like “marocain” that they, nor anyone else shall ever use.

Indian schools are notorious for creating a curriculum that is completely devoid of independent thought, problem solving, or imparting even the most basic skills. Just remember some rubbish, like how to spell the word marocain, and you get to pass the final exam. Yay! Now go a job and become someone else’s problem.

Perhaps India should have contests about memorizing random numbers. The first one to recite 1200 digits wins!

The kids in these contests COULD have been taught more useful skills, like constructing useful sentences and thoughtful paragraphs. That skill that seems to be a lost art. I can’t seem to find a decent writer to save my life. Perhaps, we should have a writing contest, but then it could not be packaged into nice TV prime time segment, complete with cute children with glasses regurgitating dictionaries.

The kids COULD have participated in hackathon where the smart kids are writing useful code that will be used in billion dollar products and websites. Then they get hired, by the next big startup to be the head of department that writes the core of next hot IPO.

Do your kids a favor. Let them take those soccer lessons or teach them useful things like gardening or fixing cars, carpentry or making websites. They will learn useful things, like solving problems and working with people.

Or, you could teach your nerdy kid how to rot in front of a dictionary all day.

Your choice.