Kudos to the folks over at Scripps-Howard news. Their annual sponsorship of the 2013 National Spelling Bee will come with a significant change. For the first time students will be asked to define a contest word in addition to merely spelling.
In themselves, spelling bees have been mildly controversial in education circles but, ultimately, judged harmless. And I guess they are. But fueled by incessant ESPN attention, our “national” bee has become a one-day-a–year-event each May where pimply faced kids momentarily become cable TV rock-stars.
The light shines brightly on them because they have successfully commanded to spelling memory words like stromuhr (a device to measure flow in arteries and veins), cymatotrichous (having wavy hair) or euonym (a name well suited to a person, place or thing). But until now, knowing what these words actually meant was not required for contest success.
Now the valuable and important element of context is demanded—at least to the point of a having children know of what they speak. The irony is the consequence of this rule change flies in the face of common communication trends in the digital world. The ubiquity (to be common or everywhere) of personal communication devices and the truncated (to cut short or curtail) messages they spawn deliver comparatively little context. At a time when the context of something is becoming ever more valuable, technology and application of it is making it increasingly rare. It is refreshing to see one small step in the other direction.
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John Durante is senior marketing associate for WordWrite Communications.
