Beeline

Chapter One

Kids Today

Thirteen-year-old Sai Chandrasekhar strode up to the mic during the semifinal round of the 2015 National Spelling Bee with the confidence of someone who had nothing to lose. This was not the case. Sai had spent three years preparing for this high-stakes competition. She was focused on surviving the two semifinal rounds and advancing into the coveted live finals on ESPN. Only a dozen or so kids make it each year. While she was grateful to be on the stage at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, just south of Washington, DC, she badly wanted to go further.

Ready to start, Sai paused when the competition director signaled her to wait. Auditorium lights dimmed and we turned our attention to the two giant screens flanking the stage. We watched Sai’s speller feature while television audiences saw it on ESPN2. Sai loves this aspect of being in the Bee, she’d tell me later that summer. “It’s so cool. It’s the only way I’ll be on ESPN!”

Sai’s feature is captivating. It showcases her daily commute from Flushing, Queens, to the Upper East Side of Manhattan on the New York City subway. On a good day, it takes her forty-five minutes to get to Hunter College High School, where she attends middle school. On camera, Sai tells viewers that the building used to be a weapons armory and looks like a brick prison—no windows. Hunter is one of the most competitive public schools in New York City, with a gifted and talented program that she tested into in kindergarten. As she rides the 7 train, she gazes at the New York City skyline. She loves photography, telling viewers, “I probably have, like, a thousand pictures on my phone.” She plays clarinet, is a midfielder on her school’s lacrosse team, and likes to ice skate. She speaks Tamil and Spanish. Sai has long had a passion for language and has been an avid reader since she was a toddler.

The audience applauded enthusiastically when the feature concluded. If they had liked her before, they seemed especially impressed with her afterward.

All eyes were back on Sai as she stood onstage. She wore her thick hair in two plump braids with a middle part. Her striped cardigan was part of her signature look, along with a plaid shirt, jeans, and black Nikes with a white swoosh. Her casual style was a counterpoint to the clinical poise she demonstrated each turn at the mic. Unlike spellers who fidget, mumble, or wear anxiety on their faces, Sai remained calm.

Sai was not always such a cool competitor. She had to learn how to manage her excitement about her extensive word knowledge. She remembers misspelling gingivitis in a Manhattan bee in 2013 simply because she was so excited to recognize the word. Now when Sai gets a word onstage, she tries to visualize it in print. She writes the letters out on her palm and thinks about which version looks better based on what she is hearing. Sai has learned to go with her first instinct, even under the time constraints. “I’m fine with the time limit. It makes you think schematically, and I like that. I don’t second-guess, I just spell it.” Sai regards the Bee as a sport and thinks the mental strength and capacity needed to compete at this level should be celebrated.

Sai positioned herself at the microphone. She had some stage experience through her school debate team and playing the clarinet, but nothing quite like this. To handle it, she tells herself, “Don’t focus on the cameras. Cameras are not there to hurt, just to document. Being distracted by them isn’t what you’re here for. You have to focus on the pronouncer and what you’re doing.” She smiled directly at Jacques Bailly, the 1980 National Spelling Bee champion and now pronouncer, and awaited her word.

Littoral, relating to the seashore. Sai’s smile grew into a grin as she repeated it back.

Sai is extraordinary in many ways, but not unusual. At age thirteen, she has a public persona, has been the subject of several media features, has won national contests, and has participated in a staggering array of extracurricular activities. The opportunities available during childhood, as well as the number of activities young people choose to take on, has changed dramatically from past generations.

Now kids are doing in elementary and middle school what older Millennials were expected to do in high school and college. They have resumes, become Instagram and YouTube stars, establish corporations, and offer coaching services at pricey hourly rates. With the help of their parents, but driven by their own goals, they earn thousands of dollars, and in some cases, millions. Many are interested in politics, current events, travel, and self-actualization. As I discovered over the course of my research, time management is something they learn to navigate early on in their heavily scheduled lives.

Like any national competition, the National Spelling Bee is the most challenging platform in the field of spelling. It has been dubbed the “orthographic Super Bowl” and has grown to fit that title.¹ The competition to get there intensifies each year. Since the 1990s, the size of the Bee has nearly doubled. Of the 11 million kids who participate in spelling bees annually, what used to be around 150 competitors has burgeoned to north of 500. Of those, no more than 50 advance past the preliminary rounds, and about a dozen are featured in the live championship finals broadcast during prime time on ESPN. The competitors I met during my research at the National Spelling Bee belong to Generation Z, born 1997 onward. They bring a distinctive approach to competition, self-presentation, and what it means to win.

Where does this drive come from, and how have children today learned to navigate the complicated path to success? Intense competition is now an openly acknowledged and routine part of childhood outside of the school day. Travel sports, televised contests, academic fairs, and game tournaments are standard fare for elementary school kids.

Even those who don’t aspire to be national competitors still understand the playing field. My twelve-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter are like many middle-class children with a variety of extracurricular activities and interests. Like their peers, they are accustomed to thinking about time management, competition, and goals. Their friends compete in chess tournaments and science fairs, travel for soccer, and are on dance teams. On television, they see kids their age win cooking shows and face off against adults on The Voice. People don’t tell them they are too young for anything because now there is a junior version of nearly every adult contest. They are not expected to just imagine their adult lives but to begin living them right away. The question has shifted from “What do you want to be when you grow up?” to simply “What do you want to be?”

As with any generation so new, few things are agreed upon about Generation Z. Two things are certain: they have had greater exposure to digital culture than any previous generation, and they are the most racially and ethnically diverse generation in US history. Marketers have taken the lead in sketching the contours of Generation Z, aiming to characterize their consumer and media tastes as young children, tweens, and teens. Beeline offers an anthropological counterpoint to those market-driven definitions. Parents, teachers, and anyone wishing to understand this generation can also do so by observing how it is a product of changes in childhood, the growing influence of immigrants, generationally distinct parenting styles, and kids defining themselves through social and broadcast media. Much can be learned from looking at National Spelling Bee participants, studying them closely as bellwethers of Generation Z.

Kate Miller entered the semifinal rounds of the 2014 National Spelling Bee with a powerful secret. The previous night, she’d received her score from the written test that spellers take to qualify for finals. After breezing through her preliminary-round words, maelstrom and weevil—child’s play for a speller of Kate’s caliber—she did well enough on the finals test to advance to the live prime-time competition if she could just make it through two onstage rounds of the semifinals. Kate had exceeded even her own expectations and had no intention of stopping. Just two words to spell correctly. She had spelled so many over her years of competition, what were two more?

Kate is from Abilene, a midsize town in West Texas. She is tall and slender, with wide, animated eyes and the long, smooth, straight hair of shampoo commercials. She had come a long way since she first became interested in spelling. When she was six, she watched her younger brother Jack playing with refrigerator magnets, making simple words. She decided it looked fun, and that she could do it better. Watching the National Spelling Bee on television that year piqued her curiosity further, and she became inspired by what she saw. Kate’s mom explained to her that only the most accomplished, prepared spellers advance through regionals to the national bee. “I had no idea what it was like, but if the best spellers were there, I wanted to go. Early on, I developed a strong passion and that dream.”

Kate won her first school spelling bee in second grade, when she was eight years old. Despite dominating her school bee again in the third and fourth grades, she had to wait until fifth grade to compete in regionals due to a minimum age requirement. Fifth grade came; Kate easily won her school and district bees and made it to the regional competition. She tied for fourth place. In sixth grade, she started to study word lists devotedly, determined to win at regionals and advance to nationals. That year, she made it to the National Spelling Bee. She was elated, but also didn’t know what to expect. Each year, the National Spelling Bee modifies its format to suit the needs of that year’s competition. In 2012, she would take a written spelling test before onstage competition, and a second if she was named a semifinalist. Between these tests she would spell onstage twice in preliminaries, and twice again in semifinals. If she spelled correctly onstage and had a high enough score, she would advance to the finals. Kate aced her two preliminary-round words, fougade, a type of land mine, and trepak, a Ukrainian folk dance. Her test score for semifinals was not high enough.²

Seventh grade was a big year for Kate. She handily won her regional bee and traveled to Washington. A new twist awaited. It was 2013, and the National Spelling Bee had just introduced vocabulary as part of the written tests. Like many of her 281 fellow competitors, Kate was less prepared for this aspect of the competition and missed semifinals by one point. She still managed to enjoy her time at the Bee, coming in contact with a world of word-lovers and connecting with one other speller in particular, Amber Born.

Amber is the first person Kate remembers meeting at her first Bee in 2012. They both returned to find each other in 2013. They had ample opportunity to socialize at Bee Week, the week of events that feels like a cross between summer camp and an orthography conference. When the three of us spoke on Skype in 2014, Kate reminded Amber, “We were nervous, and I thought you seemed smart, so I said you’d make it to semifinals and you did!” Amber progressed to finals, and Kate cheered her on. It solidified the bond that would make them BSFFs (best spelling friends forever).

Watching Amber advance, and realizing she had only one year left to compete, Kate completely gave herself over to training. As part of her practice, Kate participated in mock spelling bees on Facebook with other spellers. One person was the pronouncer and streamed a video of themselves saying the word, and the others spelled. They’d keep going until someone won, training together to hone their skills.

Kate’s approach to spelling bees illustrates why they are considered brain sports, as one parent described them to me. They demand rigor and offer competition on a cerebral level, with great potential reward. As a brain sport, spelling bees offer an interesting window into childhood because they are age restricted. The oldest competitors are predominantly eighth graders, ages fourteen or fifteen.³ The youngest are six. When you consider the kind of aspiration, discipline, and notoriety surrounding this activity, it is astounding that children take it on so early. What’s more, spelling study at Kate’s level can take over a kid’s life, reorganizing the day-to-day rhythms of childhood. Those who become elite spellers manage and structure their time meticulously. As children do with other sports, young spellers build stamina and focus to become experts, often while taking on numerous other activities.

Until 2018, the only way to get to the National Spelling Bee was to win a regional contest and secure sponsorship from a newspaper or other business, organization, or institution. That changed in 2018 when Scripps introduced the RSVBee program that granted an additional 240 invitational spots, with spellers paying a participation fee and covering their own travel and lodging costs. Adding these wild-card spots has only increased the difficulty level of this competition, which has become much more challenging than a decade ago, when vocabulary was not assessed. The addition of vocabulary tests and several other rounds of written exams makes advancing through the contest dependent on test scores, not just spelling onstage. Many past and present spellers confirm that the difficulty of the competition continues to increase every year as the top competitors arrive better prepared and can thus handle more challenging words.

Gen Z spellers like Kate and Sai can be highly motivated without becoming ruthless in their pursuit of success. Their generation strives to be socially aware and admires those who add value to the world. They aim to make the world a better place and care about their public reputation as they do so. Like Millennials’ childhoods, Gen Z’s are highly organized. Millennials were the first to experience the hyper-scheduled childhood, with playdates and a packed slate of after-school and weekend activities. Taking this approach one step further, Gen Z kids are not only goal oriented and geared toward productivity, but can be intense competitors. They value success and acknowledge the challenges and sacrifices required. Participation trophies are meaningless, numerous kids told me. This is one of the key differences from Millennials, the “everybody gets a trophy” generation. I mean this not as a critique but as a fact: for Gen Z, winning, rather than effort, is acknowledged and rewarded.

As a sixth grader, Sai’s focused preparation allowed her to accomplish in a few months what some spellers could not with years of study. Sixth grade is considered a late start in the world of elite spelling. By comparison, her fellow competitors may have started winning local bees as early as kindergarten or first grade. Without question, Sai is gifted. But she is also an innovative, self-directed problem solver. Part of her preparation involved charting a course toward her stated goal. The first year was about “testing it out, figuring out what competitive spelling is. I’d only learned there was a national bee a couple of months before it happened!” In a region as competitive as New York City, where Sai lived, making it to the Bee on one’s first try after only preparing for a few months was astounding.

Sai was twelve when she arrived at her first National Spelling Bee in 2013. Wide-eyed and in unknown territory, Sai kept her composure and spelled correctly through the two preliminary rounds, withstanding a long first day of competition. She tested one point shy of semifinals and did not advance. “My loss drove me to tears,” she admitted. But Sai was determined not to let her newly minted spelling career end in failure.

Sai and Kate, like so many of the kids I met, are more than simply hardworking. They have become great at what they do. And they persevere in the face of failure. What makes someone good at something, and why they stick with it, is a topic of some contention. Social psychologist Angela Duckworth has identified this as “grit.”⁴ It is what keeps people invested in succeeding at certain activities, even when they are not required to. For instance, there is no elementary education requirement for kids to learn the dictionary. Yet this is what some kids decide to do. Duckworth does not link grit to talent, as being talented at something does not necessarily make one persevere. Yet so many of the elite spellers I met wanted to do just that, and succeed.

How someone becomes an expert is also a relevant question to ask here. Journalist Malcolm Gladwell employs the concept of “deliberate practice” to suggest ten thousand hours of focused activity.⁵ Others argue that some people are simply prodigies, and that hours alone won’t matter if the person does not have an affinity and ability for the activity in question. In spelling competitions, practice undoubtedly does influence how far someone can progress and how they fare against others with greater talents.

It should come as no surprise that grit is required to do something as difficult and isolating as preparing for a national contest of any kind. Competitive spelling certainly calls for it. Answering a 2015 press conference question about what it takes to become a spelling champion, Scripps National Spelling Bee Executive Director Paige Kimble said that to become the champion takes “a lot of determination and an awful lot of hard work.” She explained that all 285 kids that year were well-read and knowledgeable in word patterns, and that they were already champions of their regional contests. The elite spellers I met were willing to put in the hours over months and years to become a champion. They knew it might not be the final outcome, but it was their goal.

The most curious part of grit is what keeps people invested in an activity, especially in the face of failure. Psychology professor Carol Dweck addresses this matter through the concept of “growth mindset.”⁶ That is, the ability to learn is not fixed. Capabilities can grow in response to challenge. Failure, then, is not a permanent condition, as long as one is willing to get back into the game. This disposition toward failure is very reminiscent of what I observed in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s. During the dot-com bubble, there was no fear of failure at all. Failing at something—a start-up, a venture capital investment, or a career path—was seen as a learning experience. Sometimes it was even celebrated as a precursor for something better to come. Failing a few times could be a recipe for success. It was certainly not grounds for quitting.

Grit and growth mindset are part of what it takes to be an elite speller, as numerous kids demonstrated with their approach to studying and competing. Some of them made it to the National Spelling Bee each year only to fail to progress past the preliminary or semifinal rounds. Yet they didn’t walk away from this activity. Sai’s spelling philosophy, developed over her spelling career, captured this approach to competition: “Failure isn’t not winning; it’s not keeping it together, not being a good competitor. Winning is about keeping it together and being a good competitor as much as actually winning. People might tell you this, but it doesn’t register until you do it. So that’s been an important part of my growth.” Playing hard, win or lose, is a very Gen Z concept.