And Now, the Indian Spelling Gene?

Abstract

A LOT OF people noticed that not only was Kashyap, winner of the Scripps National Spelling Bee this year, of ancestry but so were the first two runners-up. Children of descent have won first place in five of the last seven years, and this year they made up 30 of the 273 contestants, a proportion many times larger than their 0.66% of the population. I haven't yet heard anyone mention a gene, but it's probably only a matter of time. I have, though, heard people refer to Indians' interest in spelling competitions a craze. The origins of the craze hark back to 1985. In that year, Balu Natarajan became the first American student to win. His accomplishment was received both by the community here and in India in a way similar to the reaction of the Dominican Republic when Juan Marichal became a star pitcher. It could be done, and now everybody wanted to do it. And aspirants had some advantages, according to Madhulika Khandelwal, who runs the Asian American Center at Queens College. Their parents were generally well educated, often scientists or engineers; they spoke English and knew what education could do for social advancement. They were comfortable with the rote learning methods of their homeland, and they do not regard champion spellers nerds, wrote Joseph Berger in the New York Times. That last fact could certainly give the students a boost: the Scripps spelling bee was started in the first place to promote general interest among pupils in a dull subject. There are now some 60 chapters of a foundation that is designed generally to help Indians with English but that also sponsors many local bees. chat rooms and blogs about spelling abound: if you Google Indian spelling blogs, you'll garner 148,000 entries; Googling Anurag Kashyap yields 8,900. Berger points out that, in their passionate pursuit of spelling championships, parents are just being as single-minded other American parents, who have been known to help their fledgling gymnasts, tennis players, and singers. Maybe even more so on occasion. In the 1999 movie Spellbound, about the Scripps contest, one entrant, Neil Kadakia, tells of a relative back home who has hired 1,000 people to chant prayers for him during the bee and has promised to provide meals for 5,000 if he wins. Spellbound is a taut, wonderfully watchable movie, but, it delved deeply into the families behind some of the contestants, I couldn't help thinking of those years of monomaniacally obsessive preparation a form of child abuse. It seemed a little like stuffing grain down a goose to make foie gras. New York has outlawed foie gras production, and California, the only other U. S. source, is considering a ban. Balu Natarajan, by the way, is now 33, a doctor of sports medicine, and team physician for the Chicago Fire of Major League Soccer. TIPS FOR READERS OF RESEARCH: HOW MEAN IS THE MEDIAN? Howard Wainer of the National Board of Medical Examiners called my attention to a June 29 article in the Virginian Pilot, which serves the Norfolk metropolitan area. The headline read, Teachers Practicing Zero Intolerance. Cute. It had nothing to do with violence or drugs. What reporter Mike Gruss had happened onto was a refusal by teachers to give out zeros--even for work not turned in. A zero, they argued, had too powerful an impact on a student's average grade. Some teachers would not give anything lower than a 50% or 60%, even for missing work. Gruss called it a victory over the law of It would be better to call it a loss to the wrong average. As Wainer pointed out in his e-mail, the problem was that teachers were using the mean to calculate their students' average grades. This problem would be much ameliorated--and even might disappear--if teachers switched to the median. The mean is the most common of three statistics, measures of central tendency, that all provide averages. …