Cameron Keith competes with a much older crowd at the Scripps National Spelling Bee finals in May. Photo by Mark Bowen, Scripps National Spelling Bee.
College sponsors youngest competitor’s trip to national spelling finals
Until this spring, when he stepped into the ring with 284 of the nation’s top spellers — more than 80 percent of them 12 or older — in Washington, D.C., 9-year-old Cameron Keith’s stiffest competition was his kid sister Zoe, 7.
“She was mad she didn’t win,” Cameron says coolly of the pitched battle the siblings waged for spelling supremacy at Boulder’s Friends’ School in February.
“They were neck and neck. Everybody else was out and they went back and forth, back and forth,” says their mother, Synte Peacock, a climate scientist and author.
But Zoe was the only one of Cam’s rivals who got to enjoy a trip to the nation’s capital for the Scripps National Spelling Bee finals in May, where Cam was the youngest of 285 competitors. The Boulder Bee was sponsored byBarnes and Noble, theBoulder Valley School District,Rotary Internationaland the CU-BoulderCollege of Arts and Sciences.
The kids and their parents swam, visited the Lincoln and Martin Luther King memorials, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Gallery of Art and other museums and enjoyed a Memorial Day picnic.
"I want to go back for as long as I possibly can.”
“It was really good to have (the college) help pay for our travel,” Cameron says. “Otherwise, it would have been much harder for us all to go.”
Of course, all that fun was just a sideshow to the real purpose of the trip—Cam’s competition with 13-, 14- and 15-year-olds for spelling supremacy. He performed well on the written spelling test but couldn’t match the vocabulary skills of his much-older competitors, just 49 of whom went on to the semifinal round.
“This was really, really tough,” Peacock says. “My husband and I could barely get any of the words!”
Here’s how hard: For their school competition, Cam and Zoe studied a list of 450 spelling and vocabulary words. For the regional competition, Cam drilled on a 1,600-word list—words like “perspicacity,” “Davenport” and “hallux.” And for the national bee? A whopping 27,000 words.
But after his first taste of competition, Cam is eager to come back. He took full advantage of his ringside seat on stage with the 10 finalists and took note that this year’s co-champions were, respectively, fourth- and fifth-year participants.
“I want to go back for as long as I possibly can,” he says.
And that, he now knows, means he’s going to have to make the leap from talented rookie to hard-working veteran. He will not only continue to tackle that monster vocabulary list but also study Greek, Latin, and even French roots.
As his mother says, “At this level, you can’t just luck your way to the top.”
He certainly won’t lack for motivation—or competition—considering who sits across from him at breakfast every day.
“His little sister wants him to hurry up and win it,” Peacock says, “so she can go and do the same.”
Clay Evans is a free-lance writer in Boulder.
Related Articles
Grant helps writer develop Kodak moment
‘Tempest’ meets jukebox in Shakespearean spaceship
