A few weekends ago our school, plus the three other Stanford schools, had a big Saturday morning event. There were different stations for the students to go to, but for the older students there was a spelling bee, of which I got to be a judge at.
But it wasn't done quite the same way we do it in America.
They set up stairs on the stage for students to sit on and they wrote the words down instead of verbally spelling the words one-by-one.
But in one of the more confusing executive decisions I've witnessed, they had parents...of students NOT in the spelling bee...read the words in an effort to not seem like the English-speaking teachers were favoring his/her own students (or something like that). So what resulted was Chinese--speaking parents giving their best efforts to read English words with thick accents. While their attempts were great, it sometimes didn't phonetically sound right (and students had been studying for weeks)...which made some of the students misspell or even completely misunderstand words. It was a big scandal as some parents complained their child lost because of this. And in Asia, you don't mess with educational competitions...kinda like high school football in Texas.
Anyway, I talked to them about it and they said they'd change it for next year. I'll be gone, but hopefully they do!
The parents.
After each round we each graded the papers and eliminated it and it got narrower and narrower until there were 3 winners in each of the 3 different age groups.
Two of my students got first and second in the middle age group!...
Which is much farther than I got in my sixth grade spelling bee when I misspelled the word "fatigue."
Who put that "u" in there anyway!?
2 comments:
My students always struggle with "laugh".
Love this. How interesting that they write the words. And way to have your students do awesome!
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