A Better Way to Bee

My son has been successful at spelling bees. Twice, he has won his school’s bee and gone on to regional competition. Nonetheless, I am not a fan. I have no problem with rewarding kids for good spelling. The competition doesn’t bother me either. My main problem is the extremely public failure. In addition, some of the words are more difficult than others; success is often more about the luck of the word rather than the skill of the speller. Couldn’t we have a more fair and kind way to run spelling bees?

A student at my son’s most recent school bee was given a word she did not know. She waited and thought. She contorted her face, blushed and looked down. She looked like she was going to cry. Finally, she said, in a broken voice, “I don’t know this word.” The judge encouraged her to sound out the word and try it. She did and spelled the word correctly. However, she was not so fortunate the second time this happened. And the second time felt even more painful.

Perhaps standing in front of an audience and failing builds character. Maybe it makes our kids tough. I am not sure I want tough kids. Kids in a spelling bee can feel very exposed. They are taking a big risk and, when they fail, everyone watches. I can understand why some kids have no desire to participate.

Kids in sports fail publicly. Performing arts students might make mistakes. The difference is that kids in these activities are not alone. A strike out includes a batter and a pitcher. Other performers mitigate errors on stage. Not so in a bee.

The deciding word for the most recent bee I attended was cincture. The word that the next student received was qwerty. At this point in the bee, the regular list of words had been exhausted, so no speller had been given these words in a study guide. However, qwerty is a far easier word than cincture. Words that break rules (like counterfeit because it breaks the i before e rule), follow another language’s form (airborne has an e at the end unlike most American spellings), or are obscure (like cincture) will be more difficult than even the longest commonly used words.

There is a way to address both of these issues. Spelling bees could be less a display of children’s failures and become more focused on the skills involved. Instead of spelling words orally, what if each child had a pad of paper and a writing utensil – or some form of computer. The bee could be entirely administered on a computer in the same manner as geography bees or students could sit in study carrels, so they could not see other students’ pads of paper while writing their answers.

The judge could read a word aloud and automatically provide the definition, language of origin, and other information. All spellers would then have a crack at the word at the same time. At a signal from the judge, they would show what they had written. Some would get it right. Some would get it wrong. While it is possible that only one child might err, the focus would not be on that child exclusively. All of the spellers showed their work at the same moment. No one was on the hot seat by him or herself.

While this might be less dramatic, it would be more humane and accurate. It would be a far better way to bee!

The College Search Process: Part 4

The college applications are in. All but the “final” visits are over. We are at the end of the long wait. However, that doesn’t mean we took a break. We just finished one of the least fun parts: the financial aid applications.

We couldn’t start our financial aid applications until the first of the year, when we could access the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, commonly called FAFSA. Most of the schools to which our daughter applied wanted information by mid-February. So, after the winter holidays, my wife and I sat down and filled out forms.

We started with the College Board’s CSS profile, which is a colonoscopy of our finances. It took several hours to collect all the information and enter it correctly. In addition, each of the schools asked for supplemental information.

The CSS also had some tricky questions. It asked how much we, the parents, and other family members were planning to contribute to our child’s college education. Wasn’t that what the form was going to help us determine? Isn’t the financial aid application supposed to let the schools tell us the real college costs?

Both the CSS and the FAFSA asked for information we didn’t have. Our earliest deadline was February 1st but we didn’t have all of our 1099 statements. So we had to guestimate our 2011 tax information.

The FAFSA felt easy compared to the CSS. It was shorter, quicker, and filling out the CSS had given us much of the information. However, there was the problem of “signing” it. We discovered that we needed to create Federal PIN numbers. Navigating this process took more than a little extra time, especially when the websites didn’t work properly!

It took us four or five sessions of about an hour or two to get everything entered and submitted. We thought we were mostly done and we’d have to come back and make corrections once our taxes were filed.

Then we received notice that we had to submit something called an IDOC. This is yet another set of forms for the College Board. Two of our daughter’s schools wanted these – and they wanted them by March 1st! The Federal government gives us until April 15 to file our taxes. Schools want financial information by early February. Now, we needed IDOC by March! We didn’t even have all our tax statements!

IDOC is basically all of our tax documents and a few forms. We didn’t have the necessary material to calculate our taxes. So as soon as the last 1099 arrived, we rushed and completed our tax return on February 29th.

Almost every tax form was required for IDOC. Each item also had to be labeled with the social security number of the “owner.” I ended sending a sixty-page package to the College Board on March 1st.

Finally, I returned to the FAFSA and found that, even though we submitted our taxes electronically, it takes about a week for that data to be available. Fortunately, our tax estimates were very close and there were not many changes. It took about an hour to update the FAFSA and most of that time I was learning how to import the tax information.

Are we done? I hope so! Will all this work pay off? I doubt it. Our family earns enough to make it unlikely that our child will get much aid. However, these forms are prerequisites for scholarships of any kind. Our daughter has only heard from one school and they have offered her generous merit scholarships, so I am crossing my fingers that others will follow.

In the next two to three weeks, we will hear about admissions decisions and financial aid packages. We will also return to the two universities at the top of my child’s list. Decision day is in sight!