By Cameron Pettiford
“Your word is glue.”
“Ok, J-L”
This was the moment sophomore Aaron Pan knew he would remember for the rest of his life.
After coming off two consecutive school spelling bee victories, Pan thought it would be “easy pickin’s.”
But shortly after the competition began, he became unglued.
“I just thought, I just sold, I’m last place. I really did that,” Pan said.
Up until that point, Pan said he had studied for around two to three hours in an attempt to secure his victory to complete the Delta Middle School sweep of the spelling bee. After he won the school bee, he had hoped to go on to the regional spelling bee at Ball State University, but no amount of studying or preparation could have prepared him for what happened next.
“ Once I said J-L, I knew it was over, so instead of waiting on the judges to ding the bell, I just walked over to the chairs,” Pan said.
He says that he was competing for a $30 Books A Million gift card on top of a spot in the regional spelling bee.
He believes that the pressure played a large role in his mistake.
“I feel like a big part of the spelling bee isn’t actually spelling the words,” he said. “ It’s actually just looking in the crowd and spelling in front of a crowd.”
Pan, like many other students and teachers, has had a major mishap in a spelling bee.
Dual credit English teacher Ms. Amanda Craw said that she got out on the word “cheese.”
Craw was in third grade when she last competed, and she said she spelled it “C-H-E-S-E.”
“A bunch of people got out already, so I was trying to figure out what their mistakes were, trying to fix it,” Craw said.
She said she got the word list the day before the spelling bee, and everyone in the class quizzed each other the day before and the day of the spelling bee in preparation.
Another student who has struggled in a spelling bee was sophomore Breighlyn Ellis, who last competed in a spelling bee in fifth grade. He got third place and was eliminated on the word “wraith” after spelling it “R-A-I-T-H.”
“I thought I had it in the bag,” Ellis said. “I didn’t know there was a silent W in there.”
He competed for a $50 Books a Million gift card and studied for around 30 minutes before the competition from a packet that they received.
Ellis believes that the crowd didn’t play a big role in his errors, since it was shortly after the COVID-19 global pandemic. Only the people competing in the contest were allowed in the room where they held the spelling bee.
Likewise, Spanish 1 and Spanish 2 teacher Señora Shawn Churchill says that she got out on the word “vehicle.” She initially spelled it “V-E-I-C-L-E”
“I think I just was nervous, and I just blanked,” she said.
She originally participated because her mother competed in many spelling competitions and was an English teacher, so Churchill was forced to compete as well.
“She was interested in it. So I did it. And obviously, I wasn’t as good,” Churchill said.
Churchill believes that the pressure of the crowd “absolutely” affected her performance.
Additionally, sophomore Macallister Durham was eliminated on the word “something” during his fourth-grade spelling bee.
He originally spelled it “C-O-M-E-T-H-I-N-G.” Durham also stated that “not much at all” was going through his head when he spelled it that way.
Like the others, he believes the pressure of the situation played a massive role in his demise.
“Yeah, I wasn’t thinking when I was spelling that word; if I was thinking, I probably would have got it,” Durham said.
He also stated that he wasn’t forced to compete like others in elementary school; rather, it was an option, and he figured that he had nothing better to do than compete.
Being an English teacher as well as a speech teacher, you would think that Mrs. Whitney Freeman would consistently win the spelling bees she participated in, but she was eliminated on the word “elephant.”
She stated that she either missed one of the E’s or the P-H tripped her up.
She said she only participated because it was mandatory in fifth grade. Much like the others, she believes that public speaking was one of the main factors that caused her to fail.
“I absolutely hated speaking in front of a group of people at that age, so spelling out loud was a lot of pressure,” Freeman said.
Prior to the spelling bee, Freeman said that she had studied for about a week in preparation, but even with that, she was still eliminated without placing in her class.
Whether it be that the lights were too bright or just an inability to spell the word, the word you missed sticks with you for years and years.
