Why Do ABCDs Excel at Spelling Bees?

Evan O’Dorney of California won 2007 Scripps National Spelling Bee championship today on spelling "serrefine" correctly. Words in these competitions are very hard as their pronunciations are pretty tricky (ex: epaul'ment, schuhplattler, and girolle). As usual, ABCDs performed very well. Kunal Sah couldn't manage to get into the final rounds. So, he needs to find another way for realizing his dreams. One of the kids (a 12-year old!) was very creative when he was asked about his plans on participating in the Spelling Bee - "to Bee or not to Bee, that is the question!".

While watching Spelling Bees over the past few years, I found it interesting to note that ABCDs always excel in this competition. I wonder if we have genetic predisposition for spellings, along with Japanese cars and Dockers pants. Talking about cars, I noticed that the number of American cars parked in front of our Hindu temples (based on my limited observation) are less than ~5%! In general, foreign cars dominate the local brands in the US, but not by this margin. Coming back to the Bee, here is an interesting article on ABCDs and Spelling Bees by Mr. Tunku Varadarajan. This reminded me of one Desi character (can't recollect his name) in the documentary movie Spellbound.

When an Indian-American 13-year-old won the Scripps National Spelling Bee last week--the fifth time in seven years in which a child from that ethnic group has won this stirringly absurd contest--my first reaction, naturally, was to ask why such a striking pattern of success has emerged. (Indians are 0.66% of the U.S. population.)

My second reaction was to suggest to my wife (just as gobsmacked as I by this year's bee, in which winner, runner-up and third place all had their origins in the Indian subcontinent) that Indians must have vast space in their brains for memorizing spellings, since very little of their cerebral room is taken up by social subtleties or a sense of humor.

My third reaction, since we'd just seen a charming documentary called "Mad Hot Ballroom"--in which a team of Dominican schoolkids from the Bronx had vanquished all comers in a citywide ballroom-dancing competition--was to say that, just as the Dominican children in the movie had clearly "got rhythm," the Indian kids at the bee had just as clearly "got spelling."

Of course, any suggestion that any ethnic group has "got" anything--other than a mother tongue and a native cuisine--is open in this country to vociferous attack. So I shall look for other explanations for why young Anurag Kashyap, this year's winner, was--yawn--yet another Indian kid who can spell "appoggiatura" on television before a national audience without breaking into a sweat.

As scientists will confirm, there are reasons why empirically observable patterns occur: In the case of the little Indian-American spelling champs, an arguable one is that this ethnic group has pushier parents than any other tribe, all very eager--no, make that desperate--for their kids to succeed at school, or at anything that looks remotely like school.

This attitude draws on a particular Indian cultural trait, bequeathed to broader Indian society by the Brahminical upper stratum: Success at letters is the sweetest sort of success, the achievement nonpareil.

For millennia, India was a land where the poorest scholar was held in higher esteem than the richest businessman. This approach to life proved disastrous for modern India. Jawaharlal Nehru, the country's first prime minister and a Brahmin to his manicured fingertips, had such contempt for business (and for profits) that his economic policies condemned his people to two generations of stagnation.

But Nehru would have approved of spelling bees. Indian pedagogy relies heavily on rote memorization--the result of a fusion of Victorian teaching methods imposed by the British and ancient Hindu practice, in which the guru (or teacher) imparted his learning to pupils via an oral tradition. (The Victorians, for their part, regarded correct spelling almost as a moral virtue, and certainly as a caste "signifier," to use a clumsy anthropological term.)

So the act of sitting down for months with dictionary on lap, chanting aloud the spellings of abstruse words and then committing them to memory probably taps into an atavistic stream coursing through the veins of Indian bee-children. A friend tells the story of how, in his childhood, he'd had an Indian boy home for a sleep-over. He awoke in the middle of the night to find his guest poring over the host family's Random House dictionary. "I own an Oxford dictionary," the boy had said, by way of bizarre, nocturnal explanation. "This American dictionary is so different!"

If all that sounds too much like saying that there's a "geek gene" at work here, let us consider another explanation for the Indian spellers.

There are certain cultures--particularly Asian ones--that produce child prodigies. Relentless parents, goading their children to success at the youngest possible age, are but one explanation. These are all cultures in which, traditionally, children have begun work early, in which childhood as we know it in the West is an alien idea. Indian kids are potty-trained by two. In America, that would be regarded as precocious. Pressure is brought to bear much later on purely American children than on those kids whose parents persist in old-world child-rearing ways long after they immigrate to America.

And here, perhaps, is the last piece in the Indian-American spelling-bee jigsaw. Educationally, Indian-Americans are the cream of the crop of a fifth of humanity, thanks to U.S. immigration laws, which, for decades, let in only doctors and engineers and mathematicians. So these children are the kids of parents who themselves competed--probably at a ferocious level--to get into the best Indian schools, and then to get here.

So there you have it, neatly explained. Master Kashyap--singular fellow!--is a product of a complex set of processes. Only a part of his success, I'm pleased to report, is attributable to matters deoxyribonucleic.

Finally, I learned a new word from the Bee that describes W's war team very well: Kakistocracy