M-U-S-E-U-M

You know there is an annual National Spelling Bee where every contestant listens to a spoken word and then after getting clues (such as hearing the word in a spoken sentence), he or she gets to spell that word.  If the contestant spells it correctly, he or she stays.  If not, he or she is eliminated.

I have to remind every one of you that every one of you have had to take spelling homework and spelling tests when you were young.  Spelling may seem tedious, but it’s so important for your language development during your childhood.  Now that I mentioned spelling, I don’t know if any of you had participated in a spelling bee.

Well, I participated in a local spelling bee only once in my life.  It happened in my fourth grade class at Public School (PS) 179 in Queens, NY.  That was my first year (specifically, Academic Year 1973-1974) being mainstreamed at the NYC Public School System, and I still remember my teacher over there – her name was Mrs. Bailowitz.  Yes, it’s correctly spelled, because I still have my class picture with her in it.  It’s in my home office – I have so many mementos that will help me think up some stories in the future. 

Mrs. Bailowitz was a wonderful teacher – she was encouraging, and more importantly, she was very lip-readable.  That was part of the reason why I succeeded in the NYC Public School System and beyond.  There were quite a few characters that my parents had avoided when shopping around for schools for me.  For example, PS 178, the school that was closest to my home, had a principal who cared too much about his students’ reading levels – they were among the highest levels in the city.  When my parents and I visited there, the principal told my parents that he didn’t want anyone to lower his school’s reading levels. Screw him, and I went to PS 179, a more distant school.  But it meant earlier wake-up times for me.  Sleepyhead, that’s who I was back then.

Two years later, PS 179 had to close due to budget cuts, and I transferred to PS 178 as a sixth grader.  At least it was under the leadership of a different principal when I started there. 

Nevertheless, I’m getting off the track, and I want to go back to the spelling bee.  Of course there was no sign language interpreter, and I had to rely on my lip-reading.  Mrs. Bailowitz was pronouncing words, and students were spelling.  So good, so far.  At the beginning, there were about 26 students, and now there were two students left – me and a female student.  She was very smart and pretty, and she dressed sharply.  She was doing well in the bee, but I knew I was an excellent speller.  When it was my turn, Mrs. Bailowitz pronounced a word.  I said what?  I could not read what she said.  She kept saying it again, but my mind went blank, and I was getting tired towards the end of the day.  She wrote a sentence on the blackboard, leaving a blank space for the word.  To me, that was too simple a sentence – I believe she wrote “I went to a _______.”  Somehow, she added to the sentence, “I went to the Metropolitan _____ of Art.”  OOooooohhh, I said museum, and spelled M-U-S-E-U-M.  By the time I spelled it, it was the end of class, and the female student and I were tied for first, because all of us had to go home.

The reasons the spelling bee lagged at the end were 1) there were no rules except that you had to spell the word correctly or you’re out and 2) no one in the class had experience having a deaf student before.  They didn’t know how to deal with such a situation, and decided to have fun with it, though I felt (and still feel) that some of my classmates and/or Mrs. Bailowitz could’ve said something that would’ve ended my participation earlier.  Maybe they were afraid that I would be hurt if they took me out.

So, Susan Noville, I concede defeat to you, finally after 47 years!