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Why Are Indian Kids So Good At Spelling?
theodp writes "Slate's Ben Paynter looks into why Indian kids dominate the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and concludes it's because they have their own minor-league spelling bee circuit (having the discipline to spell 7,000 to 8,000 words a day probably helps too!). Indian-Americans make up about 1% of the US population, notes Paynter, but this year an estimated 11% of the competitors at Scripps will hail from regional contests run by the North South Foundation. The NSF competitions function as a kind of nerd Olympiad for Indian-Americans — there are separate divisions for math, science, vocabulary, geography, essay writing, and even public speaking — and a way to raise money for college scholarships for underprivileged students in India. BTW, Strollerderby has the scoop on Whatever Happened to the Spellbound Kids? (RIP, Ted Brigham)."
It's probably because parents in many other countries are way more interested in driving their kids or excel in social activities or in sports than in intellectual pursuits (or not driving them to excel in anything at all).
It's weird, I read the article and came up with a completely different reason than the summary. And that reason is right in this text:
Just as Kavya Shivashankar has inspired the next wave of Indian spellers, Kavya found her bee mojo during the post-Spellbound boom. Before Spellbound, the 2002 documentary that featured Indian-American Nupur Lala's run to the 1999 Scripps title, many first-generation South Asian parents saw NSF as a way for their children to assimilate—the best way to understand a culture, after all, is to learn its language. They used the North South Foundation events as a sort of SAT prep, teaching their children to use phonetics, etymology, and word roots to suss out answers. "Our focus is not on competition," says Chitturi. "Winning becomes an outcome of you focusing on learning. You are competing against yourself, not these other people."
It seems like it's about assimilation and success to Indian-Americans as well as a great competition against yourself instead of another human -- minor league circuit or no minor league circuit. Then introduce a documentary outlining how one Indian kid succeeded by doing this and parents start picking up on it on a large scale.
If my parents and community had supported my academic interests as much as they supported my little league career, I'm sure I would have won a lot more spelling bees too.
But it's not like you had to be good at only one thing. My parents encouraged me to just be well rounded but it turned out I was terrible at sports and I loved playing trombone, reading and participating in math league. I'm sure the Indian kids get pushed to excel in sports as well but it is obvious that the cultural assimilation is very important to their parents because they most likely consider that as necessary on the path to success.
My work here is dung.
It was used in British and American English as early as last century.
From the Wiki:
"Do the needful" is an expression, now archaic or used humorously except in South Asian English (Pakistani, Indian and Sri Lankan), which means "do that which is requisite or necessary". Although sometimes parodied as a staple of contemporary South Asian English, the expression was current in both British[1] and American English[2] well into the early 20th century.
The Oxford English Dictionary lists examples of usage from 1709 (Richard Steele in the Tatler), 1771 (Samuel Foote in Maid of Bath), 1821 (Maria Edgeworth in a letter), 1831 (Walter Scott in his journal), 1929 (I. Colvin in his Life of Dyer), and 1992 (Jeff Torrington in Swing Hammer Swing!), the last likely used humorously.[1]
This space for rent.
Rent The Man Who Would Be King and you'll hear Michael Caine say it.
rj
Is it just me (and I am running a 102 degree fever, so it might be) or is the summary basically gibberish? It starts off talking about Indian kids being good at spelling, and ends with something about the "spellbound kids" (whatever the heck that is) and Ted Brigham who is apparently dead. I am very confused.
Spellbound was a spelling bee documentary. Ted Brigham was one of the kids in it. And he evidently killed himself in 2007. There's no cause of death listed, just a death notice, and families generally don't list the cause of death if it might be damaging to the person's reputation; suicide, death by erotic misadventure, really dumb accidents, etc.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
In India people speak a number of native languages and English. Assuming that parents teach their kids one or two of these native languages, Indian kids are multilingual, making them better at language. And probably multilingual parents are a better role model to these kids than the average American parent who speaks just English.
no, I don't have a sig
Not to mention the fact that the average Indian immigrant has to learn to spell that in 3 languages - English, Hindi and whatever of over 100 local languages he grew up with.
"Sports teach leadership and teamwork,"
Thats a myth. There can only be one leader in a team and most kids just want to play and have fun anyway, they're not interested in having an outdoors team building workshop with balls despite what some team coaches seem to think. When I was at school there was nothing worse than having some teacher take the sports too seriously as it just spoiled the fun. In the end I got sick of team sports altogether because of the borderline psychotic behaviour of some of the sports staff.
You are half right. The link between sports participation and leadership skills has been shown generally to be a myth, however there have been links between sports participation and teamwork. For a citation, look at page 224 of this pdf from the Journal of Leadership Education.
Additionally, I call [citation needed] on your reasoning for why sports do not build leadership. Maybe there can only be one leader in a team for most sports, but I would argue this is not a universal truth -- you could easily play a modified game of capture the flag where there are still 2 teams, but participants are broken up into "squads" of 3, with each squad having its own leader. Furthermore, if you choose sports with relatively small teams and then rotate leaders, everyone will get a decent exposure to being in the leadership role. You create a false dichotomy between "just playing and having fun" on the one side versus "having an outdoors team building workshop with balls" on the other. The study I linked provides some interesting conjectures about the disconnect between the perception that sports builds leadership and the reality, and mostly what I got from it actually agrees with your last couple statements -- the problem could well be that sports staff don't know how to properly make the sports environment a valuable leadership- and teamwork- promoting experience, and thus focus on promoting athletics to the detriment of possible leadership and teamwork promotion.
Wow do you know any nation where some kids don't want to rock stars, move stars, race car drivers, or soccer players?
Do you know any nation not awash in American 'cultural' products? Just because it's contagious doesn't mean it isn't real.
I wanted to be an astronautic myself.
But you couldn't spell "astronaut" so you had to give up your dream. Sad story, bro.
As far as religion as superstition... Go to India sometime or Japan. Shinto shines are common even in peoples homes.
70 percent of Japanese profess no religious membership[6] and possibly only one in five Japanese claim a belief in God[7]. However, polls generally show that two-thirds of Japanese profess no religion[8] and according to Demerath (2001:138), 64% do not believe in God and 55% do not believe in Buddha[9]
You can't take the sky from me...
It is called a typo. Dude.
So three in ten do have an official religion, 45% believe in Buddha which isn't God. 36% do believe in God. How many believe in the spirits of their ancestors? Gee I see pictures of Shinto priests blessing new car plants in Japan all the time. Imagine the fit if GM had a Catholic priest bless a car factory!
Again self loathing twaddle. You cherry picked Japan and even then didn't address their love of pop stars.
J
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.