Peru Middle School's Alyssa Szczypien represented the North Country at the Scripps National Bee in Washington, D.C. She was one of 15 students from New York state.
All together, there were 274 participants from throughout the United States and various foreign countries, including China, South Korea and New Zealand.
This is the third year the Press-Republican has sponsored an area student's trip to the competition. Last year, Leo Lee of the Plattsburgh City Schools attended, and Nelson Moore of Saranac Central competed in 2008.
To get to Washington, our local student must first win the Champlain Valley Educational Services Regional Spelling Bee. Many of the North Country schools send their winning spellers in grades 4 through 8 to this competition, and it's the regional champion who goes to the national contest.
The first round of the Bee in D.C. is a written test. Students get one point for each of the 25 words they spell correctly. Here are some of this year's words: obstacle, callous, tocsin, cynophilist, pusillanimous, isocryme and misoneism.
I don't know about you, but three of those words are totally unfamiliar to me. And I probably would have gotten pusillanimous wrong because words with double consonants often mystify me.
This year's winner, sponsored by Cleveland's Plain Dealer, won by spelling "stromuhr" correctly. A stromuhr, by the way, is a medical instrument used to measure how much and how fast blood flows through an artery. Of course.
SIMPLIFIED SYSTEM
Our Alyssa, Leo and Nelson, however, are not the most famous spellers with a connection to the North Country. Melvil Dewey created the Dewey Decimal system of library classification in 1873 while a student at Amherst College. I don't know how they organized books before that, maybe they shelved them the way I do around our house: shove them into the first available space.
Dewey also founded the Lake Placid Club on the shore of Mirror Lake in 1895, and was an early proponent of winter sports. Many suggest Dewey's influence eventually led to Lake Placid hosting the Olympics in 1932 and 1980.
But if you drive along Route 73, just east of the Intervale ski jumps, you will see a remnant of Dewey's other interest as you pass Adirondack Loj Road (Loj, written in a simplified spelling system for English, would otherwise be spelled Lodge).
When Dewey wrote about organizing books in a library, his spelling was nonstandard but readable: "a method that wud clas, arranje and index books and pamflets on shelves…" Dewey was a founder of the Spelling Reform Association in 1876 and, later, the Simplified Spelling Board. He was convinced that too much time was spent in elementary school teaching children to spell and that a simplified system would provide opportunity for other lessons.
He once wrote: "Speling Skolars agree that we hav the most unsyentifik, unskolarli, illojikal & wasteful speling ani languaj ever ataind."
Well, Melvil wasn't the first person to realize that not all of us think "change is good."
As difficult and illogical as our idiosyncratic spelling system is, Dewey and his colleagues haven't made much headway in the last 134 years.
Many of us have also resisted the metric system, clinging to the clumsy inches, feet, yards and miles rather than a more efficient system easily divisible by 10.
And, if Dewey and the other spelling reformers had succeeded, so words were spelled just the way they sound, there might not be a Scripps National Bee, and local kids might not have gone to D.C.
That would be regrettable. The Press-Republican is delighted to provide a student with a week's activities and participation in the Bee, where they meet and compete with other youngsters from America and foreign countries. We hope Alyssa had a wonderful time.
Jerry McGovern, the Press-Republican's coordinator of Newspapers-in-Education, taught in New York state's public schools, and now teaches in the Communication Department of Plattsburgh State. He can be reached at gmcgovern@pressrepublican.com or 565-4126. This column is the opinion of the writer and not necessarily of this newspaper.
