Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
I read this and laughed. Then I looked across the kitchen at my daughter, who was on her third attempt at spelling “recumbentibus,” and I stopped laughing.
You want to talk about spelling bees that only English needs? I will tell you about the one happening in my kitchen every Thursday night. The prize is not a trophy. The prize is that my twelve-year-old gets to go to bed before 10 PM.
Here is the thing about spelling bees: they celebrate exactly the wrong thing. They celebrate memorization. They do not celebrate understanding. My daughter can spell “jargogle” now—she practiced for an hour—but she could not tell you a single sentence where it would actually help her communicate something. Because there is not one.
English spelling is broken. We agree on this. But instead of fixing it, we turned the brokenness into a competition and gave children trophies for navigating it. That is not education. That is Stockholm syndrome.
And no, before you ask: my daughter did not pass. She got “crapulous” wrong. She spelled it with one ‘p.’ I do not blame her. Nobody needs two ‘p’s in a word that nobody needs at all.
— Michael Nguyen, father of a spelling bee survivor
I will be the expert witness for the prosecution.
Exhibit A: My daughter’s vocabulary list. Twenty words. Twelve of them contain the letter C. In not one of them does C make the same sound twice.
Exhibit B: “Crapulous.” C sounds like K. “Recumbentibus.” C sounds like K again—but wait, the first one is hard, the second one is soft? No? They are both hard? I had to check. I am an engineer with a university degree and I had to check. That is the C problem in one word.
Exhibit C: My daughter is not learning phonics. She is learning exceptions. Every word with a C is an exception to the rule you thought you just learned about C. At some point, the exceptions outnumber the rules, and the rules stop being rules and start being suggestions from a language that changed its mind three times before breakfast.
The letter C is guilty. I do not know what the sentence should be—probation, at minimum. But I know this: if English were designed by engineers, C would have been fired in version 1.2 and replaced with K and S, which at least know what they are doing.
I rest my case.
— Michael Nguyen, P.E.
