Spelling or Scrabble?
I’ve got a piece up on The Daily Beast today about whether a National Spelling Bee that’s broadcast in prime-time on network television is a good thing.
I’m sure it’ll generate a comment or two that I’m dissing the Bee itself. I’m not. The Bee is awesome. It shows off kids at their smartest. It fosters a love of language. It makes people — competitors and viewers — appreciate the breadth and depth of English. It teaches kids to focus, study and perform under pressure. And, not insiginifcantly, it makes them realize that life is a crapshoot: Sometimes you get a word you already know, sometimes you don’t.
My beef with the Bee is the move to prime time. I like watching kids spell on TV as much as the next logophile, but in my mind the issue is whether the Bee needs to be on ABC with spellers spelling until the ratings-friendly time of 10 p.m. What’s best for the competitors? That, to me, is the only question worth asking.
Kids are incredibly resilient, so blowing a word in front of an audience of millions might not look like a big deal. But it could be. So Just as it’s legitimate to ask whether the Little League World Series needs to be on broadcast TV, it’s fair to ask the same about the Bee. ”Adolescent sports aren’t meant to be entertainment for adults,” Boston sports psychologist Richard Ginsburg says in my friend Mark Hyman’s new book, Until It Hurts, about America’s unhealthy obsession with youth sports.
In 2007 and 2008, I wrote the script and was color commentator for ESPN’s coverage of the National School Scrabble Championship. It was great fun. I think the shows turned out well, we exposed a few hundred thousand viewers to Scrabble and smart kids, and most of the competitors seemed to like the attention.
ESPN dropped out this year and, while I was disappointed, I was also a bit relieved. For starters, I could focus exclusively on the kids I’d brought to the event and didn’t have to worry about making a show. (I started a Scrabble club at my daughter’s Washington, D.C., elementary school last year; four of my players joined the 200-player national championship in April, and I talked about it on NPR.) While most of the players thought having ESPN around was pretty cool — and were happy to do whatever the producers asked of them — not all were entirely comfortable. This year felt saner — because it was exlusively about the competition, the kids.
And that’s the dilemma with televising events like the Bee or Scrabble or Little League. Is the absolute virtue of exposing couch-bound, brain-locked Americans to two hours of kids being smart trumped by the distraction and the glitz and added pressure? Do events lose sight of their purpose when the cameras start rolling?
Tags: Scrabble, Spelling Bee
May 29th, 2009 at 8:18 am
I like the idea of having the Spelling Bee get attention on national TV–and I liked it when ESPN covered the National School Scrabble Championship. These kids work very hard–and I think it is great that their accomplishments are shared with so many viewers. So often in American culture it is the athlete, not the intellectual, who is celebrated. When my daughter won the 2007 NSSC, she was thrilled to get calls from friends and relatives from all across the country who had seen her on TV–and she was excited to get the admiration of her classmates. Before the ESPN show, she’d kept her love of Scrabble secret, to avoid seeming “nerdy.”
May 29th, 2009 at 9:50 am
Thanks, Corny. As you know, I don’t disagree. I think the coverage is great, but I think the purveyors need to be careful to make sure they don’t tread too heavily on the events themselves. Like the Bee — these kids had been spelling since 10 in the morning and the event didn’t end til 10:30 at night. And they kept interrupting to do those profiles and promotional interviews (Dancing With the Stars and Bee host Tom Bergeron trading blather with DWTS winner Shawn Johnson; though that did reinforce the intelligence of the competitors). And from what some ex-Bee people were saying on blogs, it seemed as if the Bee ratcheted up the word difficulty in the earlier rounds to whittle the field more quickly — perhaps so ESPN wouldn’t run over on its scheduled time slot. That’s the main thing that worries me — big TV intruding on the integrity of these kinds of events. I think we did a pretty good job with the NSSC (at least I did my best) but there were times I wished we’d just let the kids play. I do think TV coverage it’s doable — and absolutely desirable — but I also think you need to be careful to not mess with the goal: giving the kids the space to do what they do.
May 29th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
I did bees growing up in KS (Franklin County, KS champ in ‘84 (at age 10), 25th/130+ in state) and never felt too much pressure onstage. The broadcast formula might change that a bit, but frankly, for good or bad, kids are a helluva lot more media-savvy nowadays.
I think someone would have to misread your article to perceive a knock there. Having interested parties be aware of possible abuse and be in a position to decry is what the events need.
I guess I would probably not have the same ’shocked’ reaction to perceived inaction after Akshay fainted. In the eight seconds between when he started to fall and he rerose, he neither stopped moving nor went fully down (head on ground). I think it was clear to the judge from him getting up that from a laywoman’s perspective he was alright (said at 4 seconds in?). It reminds me of the ‘if someone can speak they’re not choking’ guideline, used when someone is coughing. I would guess that had his head gone down or had he not rerisen another 5 seconds, medical attention would have been sought.
Isn’t it adults’ purview to say reassuring things to kids when it’s called for, even if they don’t know for sure?
The promo certain milked the drama value out of the fainting incident, but really that’s due to the definition of ‘excitement.’ Danger is usually exciting. Now, if the promotion leads to unsafe eating practices and fainting clubs, I’d worry.
P.S. the ABC promo link has expired.