Spelling Bee Winners

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yogi
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Spelling Bee Winners

Post by yogi »

Here is a list of words that the winners spelled correctly for the accompanying years. I know what one of those words mean, but the rest are all foreign to me.

1962 – esquamulose
1981 – sarcophagus
1995 – xanthosis
2001 – succedaneum
2005 – appoggiatura
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Kellemora
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Re: Spelling Bee Winners

Post by Kellemora »

I assume those were the last words of each contest that only the final contestant got right.
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yogi
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Re: Spelling Bee Winners

Post by yogi »

That is my assumption too, but the "tweet" I stole it from didn't go into details. I was just amazed at the words kids memorize in preparation for the contest.
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Kellemora
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Re: Spelling Bee Winners

Post by Kellemora »

Back when I was in grade school, KSD used to have a spelling bee on the radio, with the final line-up on TV, channel 5 if I recall.
I entered in 4th and 5th grade, and did pretty well, made it up to 6th place before getting knocked out.
I had to skip the 6th grade contest because they switched from grade in school to age. I was too old for the 6th grade group, but since I was not in 7th grade, could not join that group either.
However, by 7th grade they went only by age, not what grade you were in. Didn't make it higher than level 25 before getting knocked out. Although it is nothing to snuff about, it was hard getting into the finals.
Because my birthday fell after Sept 1st. or Sept 5th some years, I could not start school back in the '50s.
On the bright side, this put me older and ahead of my classmates, which is how I got switched to a college prep school for 4th and 5th grade. This also meant I had to redo the 4th grade, so now I was 2 to 3 years older than most of my classmates. I think this is the only reason I excelled so well in the spelling bees.
I returned to normal school for 6th grade, and things only went downhill from there, hi hi.
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yogi
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Post by yogi »

I ran into the opposite problem in grade school. The emrolment cutoff date was December 1st and I was born November 20th. That means I was almost always the youngest kid in the classroom. In many ways that wasn't an issue, but after a few years it was obvious that it took me a little longer to learn some things that the other kids picked up right away. Looking back, it's hard to believe that not quite a year's difference in age would make that much difference.

I don't know how it happened but I came out with an IQ score of nearly 120 in my last year of elementary school. The teacher called my parents in because she was so impressed that a quiet kid with average grades such as myself could be so brilliant. It was a parochial school with virtually no science or math and I recall being bored stiff most of the time I was being educated by the nuns. From 9th grade on up reality set in. I switched to a public magnet school because it was college preparatory. The algebra teacher was very sympathetic and gave me a 'D' for a final grade. It didn't get any easier after that. Oddly enough I scored highest in math on that IQ test. Obviously I made some good guesses because I certainly didn't have the smarts. :lol:
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pilvikki
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Re: Spelling Bee Winners

Post by pilvikki »

oh school... ugh.
i was an odd duck because i had no real friends until i was 11, for i was always with my parents. i did well in anything that happened to interest me - and anything that didn't tick off my born again, spinster, ultra conservative hag of a teacher. whom i had the pleasure of dealing with for 3 years.
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yogi
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Re: Spelling Bee Winners

Post by yogi »

"born again spinster" My mind boggles at the thought
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Kellemora
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Re: Spelling Bee Winners

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I only went to school 33 days my Senior Year. That was about how many test days came up in the various classes.
Several of my classmates worked in the two strip malls near me and would let me know which teacher had an important test and what area of the book it would be on. So I would show up during my class period and take the test. This really irked a lot of my teachers too. It only takes about an hour to study the material so it is fresh in your head when you take the test.
I usually got high grades on the tests so had enough points to graduate on time with the rest of the class.
Final exams were interesting though. I didn't think I did well at all. When the results came back I scored in the top 5% on everything except the Trig and Calculus parts where I was still in the top 12%, in any case, I passed well above average.

One of my teachers actually like me and a friend of mine. His home town and parents lived in Benton, KY
We decided to skip skewl and drove down there to his parents house. We had a gift for them, based on things he told us about his parents. About ten or twelve kids pitched in to buy it for them, without the teacher knowing about it.
I don't remember now if it was a color TV or a new Amana microwave, I'm thinking it was a color TV, and the microwave was for someone else a decade or so later. Olde Age and memory loss is the pits, hi hi.
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pilvikki
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Re: Spelling Bee Winners

Post by pilvikki »

that's lovely!

and yep, i can quite understand why you'd not sit through the excruciatingly boring classes. and every time you thought we were done dealing with some point, Someone would need it dissected over again. and again.
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Kellemora
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Re: Spelling Bee Winners

Post by Kellemora »

Seems like I went from bright to dumb and back to bright for awhile, then according to my kids, I've got dumber ever since, hi hi.
Although I like to learn stuff, the way skewls went about it was, as you said "excruciatingly boring."
Going back to when I was only knee high to a grasshopper, one of my grandfathers was strict about learning the classics.
We always had Friday night dinner at our grandparents, along with dads brothers and sisters and their kids.
Because we were always dressed up like on Sunday's for church, all the kids filed into the large side living room away from the adults, and grandpa would come in there with one of his huge Shakespeare books and have us read from it.
One set of those books got passed down to me, and I have them in an office in the house. The leather covers are cracking from old age, but the insides of the books are still perfect. Even the onionskin over each drawing is still intact. Surprising when you consider how many kids used these books over the years.
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yogi
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Re: Spelling Bee Winners

Post by yogi »

I didn't read Shakespeare until I reached college. It was more interesting doing it in class than it would have been on my own because of the discussions. However, I didn't get much out of it at that age and can't imagine what young children could possibly extract from such tomes.
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pilvikki
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Re: Spelling Bee Winners

Post by pilvikki »

the only shakespear i've read was from abysmal swedish translations that totally killed any interest in his works. never tried them in english, except for bits and pieces
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Kellemora
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Re: Spelling Bee Winners

Post by Kellemora »

It really helps when you get to go see a live play, then it all comes into focus.
As long as these books have been on the shelf, after we went to see a play, Debi pulled one off the shelf to read.
She enjoyed reading it, because she had the visual already in her headbone.
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pilvikki
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Re: Spelling Bee Winners

Post by pilvikki »

there's an idea! i'll do that if one is going around in london when i get there. it's dirt cheap to fly over, last time something like $50 return, complete with train ticket to london from stansted. i have forgiven ryanair, as they fly from 20 mins from here and the last trip was great with nobody acting like asses. yay.
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Kellemora
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Re: Spelling Bee Winners

Post by Kellemora »

A lot of colleges have stage plays, usually reasonably priced, and often a well known performer is part of the cast.
We used to go all the time. I can't think of a play I didn't enjoy watching, even when it was something I didn't think I would like. Something about live plays increase the enjoyment level.
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yogi
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Re: Spelling Bee Winners

Post by yogi »

I agree with the comment about live performances being the best form of entertainment. I've seen a few plays downtown Chicago put on by professionals, but most of the live plays I've seen were locally produced by a theater group. A friend of mine was the producer and I always got the best seats in the house. The thing that I was surprised about is that they had to pay to put on the performances in spite of the fact that the audience was generally less than 50 people and the venue more often than not was in a high school auditorium. From what I understood they seldom broke even.
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Kellemora
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Re: Spelling Bee Winners

Post by Kellemora »

The expense to put on a play is enormous.
Not many of the live theaters here are wired for the extensive stage lighting and other equipment, so a large tractor trailer with a huge dynamo is rented to power the performance equipment.
In some cases, traveling troupes bring their own stage equipment, including the lighting, and all of that has to be set up too.
If you go to the theater at other times, you will see most of the stuff that was in there for the performance is no longer there.
There are high budget shows and low budget shows, and honestly, I think the low budget shows are the best to see and hear.
All of the local theater group performances I have attended since I moved south have never been disappointing in the slightest. Even some that were not supposed to be comical turned out to be due to a prop failure, and the actors and actresses improvised to keep the show moving, often with a few comical remarks tucked in.
At one Shakespearean play, an actor came through a doorway and is suspenders caught the door handle.
This in turn pulled the flimsy wood framed paper door off the wall prop.
An actor near him grabbed the door and commented, putting on a little extra weight there Sir John.
While another actor who didn't belong on stage at that time appeared, "Did someone call for the village carpenter?"
The response was "No, we called for a dietitian for Sir Circumference so he can return to playing Sir John."
The back-stage actor took the door and disappeared in back, and the show resumed it's normal script.
Lighting was taken away from the broken doorway, and when lights were in that area again, the door was back in place with some tape on the backside to repair a tear in the paper front.
Another time, a fake tree started leaning in slow motion. Like the heat was affecting the resin base.
Once it was about at a 45 degree angle it simply toppled over.
The timing couldn't have been more perfect for the performance, and what the actor just said to an actress.
The actor turned and picked up the tree, turning it 90 degrees and leaning it back against the wall prop corner.
We could hear him say, "She's supposed to fall for me, not you!"
Most of the time, a play goes on without a problem, or if there is one, we don't know about it, because the actors worked it into what they were doing.
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