Hannah Schill, 13, stood at the microphone, poised and confident. When the spelling-bee announcer enunciated the word
nougat
, Schill repeated the word and then asked for the definition: a confection of nuts or fruit pieces in a sugar paste.
The eighth grader from the Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander University of Pennsylvania Partnership School slowly said the word again before spelling it.
The correct answer yesterday propelled her into the final round of the Philadelphia contest for the 2008 Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee. The popular bee, held every spring in Washington, was the subject of an award-winning documentary,
Spellbound
, and airs on prime-time television.
The Philadelphia competition, sponsored the Philadelphia Tribune and Independence Blue Cross, was held at the School District of Philadelphia's administration building on North Broad Street.
Participants came from public, private, charter and Catholic schools. In the morning, 30 fifth graders competed in a spelldown. The winning five then competed in the afternoon with 39 sixth, seventh and eighth graders.
Parents and teachers in the audience moaned at the difficulty of the selections, including
verboten
,
pelota
and
kudzu
. Some doubted that
jeremiad
- a prolonged lamentation or complaint - was even a word. The youngsters who were eliminated seemed to shrug off their fate and sat down in the audience.
But not Sowsan Sallaam, a pink-sweatered 10-year-old from Schill's school who was the last fifth grader left in the final round. After misspelling
belligerent
, she wept in the back of the room despite consolations from family and friends who told her that she was a star for having gotten so far.
Mariska K. Bogle, director of planning and development for the Tribune and the event's organizer, sympathized with Sallaam. She told the youngsters that she was once a spelling-bee competitor. In fifth grade, she represented her school, William B. Evans in Yeadon, in the Delaware County bee but stumbled on a word. She refused to divulge it, but more than 30 years later, she said, "it still haunts me."
In the end, just Schill and Mariam Sarkessian, a seventh grader at Agora Cyber Charter School, were vying for the week's all-expenses-paid trip to Washington, a computer, and other prizes.
Sarkessian misspelled
pasteurize.
Then Schill spelled
renaissance
and
segue
- after asking for the definitions for both - and clinched her win.
The tall girl, with gold and turquoise streaks in her brown hair, said she had learned that steady wins the race.
"I make mistakes when I go too fast," Schill said. This was the second year someone from her school had won the competition, said Megan Wapner, its beaming spelling coordinator.
Schill loves to draw and to compose poetry. She writes on a computer, but, no, she never uses spell-check. "I like to proofread my work," she said.
Such sentiments bring joy to Ed Lawrence, a social-justice teacher who hosted a spelling bee yesterday at Archbishop Ryan High School in Northeast Philadelphia.
There, 73 seventh graders from parochial and private schools in Philadelphia, Bucks and Montgomery Counties went through 10 tense spelling rounds. The winner was Julia Alamia from St. Anselm School, who correctly spelled the final word,
miniature
. The prize was a $1,000 scholarship to Archbishop Ryan, a Philadelphia Archdiocesan high school
Lawrence had purposely sent out invitations with the spell-check-approved but erroneous sentence "Eye hope two sea ewe their."
But Lawrence is not averse to all technology. At the Ryan event, words to be spelled were handed to the pronouncer by a small robot from Drexel University.