Spelling Bees

Scientific Name: Apis Cantionis
Natural Habitat: Elementary Schools
Diet: The necessity of literacy.
Specimen:

That's right, spelling bees. Now you're probably thinking, "Kidd, that's a really specific and relatively harmless thing to hate." Wrong. Spelling bees are the reason 72% of today's youth think "great" is spelled with a number. In theory, these competitions are designed to have the opposite effect, to encourage learning through competition and reward. Alas, it is but a charade; a horrible back-firing charade. Why? Because the spelling bee, by rewarding its winners, gives our children the impression that spelling is some kind of special skill to be specially rewarded, like not everyone should be able to do it. It's like celebrating graduation from kindergarten. Here, congratulations for doing something everyone is expected to do. Not only are you expected to do it, I'm pretty sure it's impossible to "not be able to spell." But that's exactly the sort of excuse that spelling bees enable.

Granted, English isn't a perfect language; it has its quirks, but it's basically phonetic and once you learn the rules, if you can spell one thing you can spell anything. No one can spell any better than anyone else. Words are only spelled, in most cases, one way. And that's what the word is. Otherwise it's a different word. There's no creativity, there's no memorization, no talent or skill involved. In other words, there is no scale of better or worse "spellers." And that's a word that shouldn't even exist... like "breathers" or "sleepers. If anything, rather than glorifying a mastery of the mundane, we have special words for people who are unable to do these things. In fact, English is the only language with a word for spelling, and the US is the only country that puts on these embarrassments. Everyone else in the civilized world just does it. All we're left with is little punks with false self-confidence because they're surrounded by illiterate savages, and the savages with a free excuse never to "learn how to spell."

One more thing. Nobody has ever spelled anything out loud in the history of man, outside the context of a spelling bee. We can write things down. That's what paper's for. In fact, that's the whole point of spelling in the first place -- to write things down for other people to read. If you're talking out loud, you just say the words. If you insist on having spelling bees, why not have them write the words? And if you still have trouble, we have whole big books dedicated to how words are spelled and what they mean. They're all already written down in there. What do you have to spell out loud them for? You heard it here first, spelling bees are the worst people in the world.