By Jean Wang
The Princeton Public Library held its fourth annual spelling bee on May 1, challenging its participants, who ranged from fourth graders to eight graders, with words like spelunking and ocelot.
Organized in a Jeopardy! format, the event featured four teams: The Buzz, Rumble Bumbles, Yellow Jacket Fever, and Stings Like a Bee. Each team had four members and the teams were allowed to discuss the spelling of the word before selecting one member to stand up and officially spell the word. Members of the team were to take turns spelling.
“It was a good event because they gave you a shot to get back in,” Zainab Qureshi, a 7th grade student at John Witherspoon Middle School, said. “I mean, if it’s a simple error, you’re not a bad speller.”
Parents liked that the spelling bee was designed to be fun rather than competitive.
“It was low key and low stress,” said Munaza Shamshad, whose daughter Eman Shamshad participated. “I liked the way they made it light and funny.”
Categories ranged from “X Marks the Spot,” featuring words that contained the letter X, to “Words on Loan,” featuring words that were borrowed from another language. The words ranged in difficulty and seriousness, including obscure words such as fossorial and fun words like flatulent.
Many of the words were difficult for the adults present as well. When one student misspelled retch as wretch, a group of parents expressed surprise at the true spelling.
“I didn’t know it either,” one mother exclaimed. “See, I’m learning things too.”
While originally only two of the four teams were to advance to the final round, the closeness of the scores led event organizers to decide to allow all teams into the final sudden death round.
In sudden death, Rumble Bumble and Yellow Jacket Fever were the first teams to be eliminated, after misspelling tricky words like mayonnaise. After Stings Like a Bee misspelled their word, Maya Gunaseelan, a 4th grader at Millstone River School, clinched the championship for her team, The Buzz by correctly spelling hypotenuse.
“I love spelling. I’ve basically been doing it since I could spell, since I was four,” Gunaseelan said. Only the weekend before, she had gone to a spelling bee in Virginia.
Margie Subramanian, Gunaseelan’s mother, said her daughter found out about the spelling bee online. “Every day, she would ask if I registered.” Subramanian said. She further cited James Eng, a teacher at Millstone who inspires and encourages her daughter.
Qureshi, who had participated the spelling bee a few years ago, also attributed her decision to partake in the spelling bee to her experiences in school.
“In third, fourth and fifth grade, we always had spelling groups where we learned how to spell,” Qureshi, a member of Rumble Bumble, said. “I was always in the accelerated group, so I thought why not give it a shot.”
The spelling bee first came about four years ago when the Go-Between Club, a group for middle school students, suggested holding such an event.
“A lot of our programs for young people are actually suggested by young people,” said librarian Aaron Pickett. Picket also served as the MC of the event.
Librarians, teen volunteers and work study students from Princeton Theological Seminary were involved in organizing and executing the event, including coming up with the words list and serving on the judging panel.
“I’m never disappointed by ‘they can’t spell this,’ I’m always amazed they can spell this,” said librarian Martha Liu, who was one of the four judges.
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