Gotta spell ‘em all.
Which is exactly what Deven Ramanthan did Wednesday afternoon at the 2024 edition on the Monongalia County Spelling Bee.
Deven, a Mountaineer Middle School seventh-grader, laid down the lexicon law with “vandalize,” to earn his passage to regional competition next month at Fairmont State.
He bested a field of top spellers from across the county, including Alex Fowler, of Skyview Elementary, who matched him word-for-word, right up to the final round.
“I really wasn’t nervous,” Deven said.
With his hands his pockets, he often shifted on his feet, and expelled breaths in a whoosh, as he asked Danica Rubenstein, an administrator with Mon County Schools who was pronouncing the words for the bee, to please repeat – while using the word in question in a sentence.
“It helps me visualize the words,” Deven said.
“I just kind of break them down into chunks,” he said. “It’s easier.”
A bee is born
Generations of wordsmithing youngsters have been breaking down words in sanctioned competition since 1925.
That was the year a Kentucky newspaper first launched an official competition in the Bluegrass State.
Now, nearly 100 years later, the bee is a bona fide American intellectual event, with the national finals held in Washington, D.C. area – it always happens in May – with all that media coverage.
There are the newspapers carrying guest columns from the finalists in the readership area.
Social media.
C-SPAN.
And more.
In today’s time of low reading scores and seemingly no reading fluency, some educators who are critics of spelling bees say they’re lots of work – with little return.
The repetition and learning by rote, they worry, can only make for fleeting moments of shakily acquired knowledge. Moments, they say, that are gone: just as soon as a speller slinks to his seat, defeated in the first round.
Joe Paull, the late educator and community organizer, used to gleefully pronounce the above assessments … wrong.
After all, he’d say, there are more than 1 million words in the English vocabulary, with most owing their origins to Latin and Old English.
There are the aforementioned Dutch derivatives and carryovers from French and Yiddish, too.
Paull called out a lot of those words for spelling bees in Mon and the region for more than 30 years.
Prepping for the bee does indeed help with reading fluency, he’d counter.
Besides, he’d continue, there’s the etymology, history, anthropology and sociology of the endeavor — all wrapped up in one word.
Spelling bees foster self-esteem, critical thinking and deductive reasoning, he’d add.
Being in the bee, he said, means one couldn’t be more alone on stage.
Even with the moms and the dads and the little brothers and the big sisters in the audience.
No spell-checker or dictionary app either, he said.
“Think about that,” he said.
“You’re in the arena, basically in front of a lot of people you don’t know, doing something that’s not always easy to do.”
Spelling ‘victory’ with Pokémon, too …
Meanwhile, Deven knows all about being in the global arena.
That’s because he’s also fluent in the language of Pokémon, the Nintendo juggernaut that spawned a whole universe of video games and card games.
Players go after a host of avatar characters, driven by the objective, “Gotta catch ‘em all.”
Deven, along with this brothers, Byron Ellison and Landon Ellison, are all globally ranked Pokémon practitioners, winning top honors in recent rounds from Japan to Brazil to the United Kingdom.
“He’s used to performing under stress,” his mom, Pavi Ellison said of her son, the Mon Spelling Bee champ.
