100th annual Scripps National Spelling Bee: Four-time returning speller from Pullman to compete with Spokane Valley home-schooler
May 26—Brogue, Osprey, Drumlin, Gastronome, Eucalyptus, Rapscallion, Lithophone.
These are a handful of words that secured Spokane Valley's Gabriel Aguirre one of 243 spots in the upcoming Scripps National Spelling Bee in D.C. on Wednesday and Thursday.
The 11-year-old home-school student finished runner-up in the Inland Northwest Spelling Bee, behind Sandpoint's 14-year-old Andrew Ford, also home-schooled and also headed to D.C. Competition will be fierce as ever as 14-year-old Navtaj Singh, of Pullman, is competing for the fourth straight year, his final year of eligibility. His best finish was in 2023, when he tied for 12th place.
Gabriel misspelled the word "Sobersides," while Andrew got it correct in their 12th round at the qualifying contest hosted at North Idaho College.
Asked if he has a strategy to improve his spelling, Gabriel came up empty.
"I bet there might be a formula, but I just try to practice," he said. Gabriel uses practice spelling apps on the phone, but beyond trying to memorize the whole dictionary, he's at a loss for how to better his game. He's a natural, said his mom, Whitney Aguirre.
His mom doesn't push him to practice, knowing her son learns better independently, when "left to his own brain," she said.
"He graduated from all the spelling books that I could find for him, so he has a natural ability to spell pretty well," she said.
Gabriel taught himself to read at the age of 4, watching his older brother explore the written word and figuring he could, too. At the age of 9, he'd outgrown the curriculum for home-schooled high-schooling, stumping his mom on where to go from there.
"A couple years ago, I stopped even teaching him spelling," she laughed.
Gabriel isn't sure how he got so good, he said. Aguirre said part of it is a God-given ability around language, as well as memorization. When rules and patterns are involved, "his mind is like a steel trap," she said.
"Gabriel has an interesting ability to comprehend a lot of details. His curiosity, coupled with that ability, have made him go way to the top," she said.
Asked his favorite thing about spelling, "I like correcting people," Gabriel said with a grin.
Whitney home-schools all four of her kids, Gabriel the second oldest. He enjoys it, he said, and feels like he could be limited in a typical public school setting. Learning independently allows him to move at whatever pace he likes and pick whatever interests him next. He's advanced in math and working on Italian.
"It can be a little bit less formal than a school can, but he's still learning, and he's doing it in a way where he takes ownership for what he's doing," Aguirre said.
Gabriel and his mom are excited for their trip to D.C., looking forward to the contest but also time to jaunt around the nation's capital with 242 of the best young spellers in the country, including Navtaj, seeking to beat his record of 12th place.
"One thing that I've learned is that I've managed to refine my strategy when I'm actually competing," Navtaj said in an interview, explaining that, whereas in past years he was improvising. "Now I've actually kind of come up with a strategy that I think will help me."
Ever the competitor, Navtaj didn't disclose that strategy, but he said this year's Bee will be about more than just how high he finishes.
"When I'm actually there, I kind of just want to take everything in," he said, "seeing as I can't go back again after that."
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the National Spelling Bee, which has grown from a field of just nine contestants in its first year to a nationally televised spectacle featuring hundreds of elite spellers. The increasing degree of difficulty is evident in the winning words over the years, from "croissant" in 1970 and "luge" in 1984 to "guetapens" in 2012 and "scherenschnitte" in 2015.
After the 2019 Bee ended in an unprecedented eight-way tie when even words like "pendeloque" and "auslaut" proved too easy to eliminate the accomplished spellers, organizers have made several changes in an effort to winnow the field.
The 2022 competition increased the emphasis on the meaning of words, with a vocabulary round that required contestants to choose a word's definition in a multiple-choice format. That year's Bee ended with a series of increasingly obscure proper nouns, including "Senijextee," an archaic alternate spelling of Sinixt, one of the 12 bands of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation.
Scott Remer, who finished fourth in the 2008 National Spelling Bee and now coaches spellers, said this year's Bee will have a preliminary test for the first time since before the COVID-19 pandemic. That test, he said, should help the organizers choose words that challenge the spellers without eliminating too many of them in the early rounds.
"I think the hope is that the preliminaries test is going to allow the word panelists to have a better feel for the general level of the field, which will help them to calibrate the word list appropriately," he said.
Twenty-six of Remer's current students qualified for this year's Bee, he said, in addition to eight of his former students, including Navtaj.
Navtaj said that although he isn't working with a coach this year, he has changed how he's preparing for the Bee.
"Whereas the previous years, I was focused more on memorizing patterns, this year I'm still trying to memorize a lot of patterns and stuff, but I also think it would be helpful to just see a lot of words," he said. "In a way, it's kind of like learning how to play an instrument without playing the instrument, whereas now I'm playing the instrument a lot more."
Remer said that approach makes sense, because a speller's knowledge of the linguistic underpinnings of the English language tends to make spelling feel more natural — even the most obscure entries in the Merriam-Webster Unabridged dictionary from which the Bee's words are chosen.
"There's something to be said for the power of intuition and kind of just feeling the word or letting the word speak to you," Remer said, adding that what feels like intuition is often the result of lots of practice and the mind unconsciously recognizing patterns.
"There's kind of an interplay between intuition and conscious training," he said. "For spellers, once they've hit a certain critical mass of words that they've done — and language rules, and Latin and Greek stems and stuff like that — that's sort of when these unexpected connections occur, and when it starts becoming more fluid, and where you start realizing you know how to spell something even though you actually haven't ever seen it."
Elena Perry and Orion Donovan Smith's work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.
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