Thursday, May 31, 2001

Day Five: Movin' on up: Last year's runner up takes Bee title

By Eric Enders / Bee Staff

Photos by Mark Bowen / Bee Photographer

WASHINGTON, D.C. (May 31, 2001) – For only the second time in history, a National Spelling Bee runner-up has returned to the Bee to become champion. 13-year-old Sean Conley of Anoka, Minn., who placed second in last year’s contest, correctly spelled “succedaneum” on Thursday to win the 74^th annual Bee.

Sean’s championship marks the culmination of a lifetime of studying words that began at age 2, when he taught himself to read using refrigerator word magnets. In a three-day contest that lasted 17 tense rounds, he survived a showdown with equally talented Kristin Hawkins of Leesburg, Va., who stumbled on “resipiscence” after spelling 14 consecutive words correctly. Among the words Sean survived on his way to the title were “schadenfreude” (enjoyment gained from the mishaps of others), “gallimaufry” (a medley or hodgepodge), and “pilchard” (a herring-like fish).

Sean said his toughest word, though, was “inesculent,” which he spelled correctly in the fourth round. After much contemplation, he correctly guessed “e” over “a” as the last vowel in the word. The fourth round was his biggest challenge last year, too, when he guessed “floppety” correctly before eventually finishing second. “There’s a lot of luck involved in this Bee,” he said. “I didn’t know every single word out there. I could have gotten a word early on and missed. It happens. I wasn’t sure that I would win this year, because I didn’t study as hard as I did last year. Now that I’m going to school, I guess I haven’t had as much time.”

Like recent champions Rebecca Sealfon and George Thampy, Sean has received most of his education through home schooling by his parents. This year he attended school for the first time, enrolling at Minnesota Renaissance School in Anoka, Minn. He said his years of home schooling, though, allowed him to devote more time to studying for the Bee than he would have been able to otherwise. “Basically, home schooling lets me learn whatever I want,” he said. “There are a lot of different ways to home school, and the way that I did it, my parents didn’t necessarily teach me. They taught me some things, but a lot of things I just learned on my own. The spelling I did partly on my own, and also my mom and dad were helping me learn the words by quizzing me.

“I’ve been studying for six years, since third grade. Last year I probably studied the most of any year. For about a month before the National Bee last year, I was studying three hours a day. This year I don’t have much time because I’m not home schooling anymore, so I probably studied only half an hour to an hour a day.”

Sean said he used a study list compiled by Hexco, Inc., a private provider of academic study materials, that contained almost 20,000 spelling words. “I went through each page and I wrote down every single word in a notebook, then for the ones that didn’t have definitions and pronunciations, I looked them up in the dictionary and wrote in those things so they would help me memorize the word,” he said.

Before Sean, the only runner-up to later become champion was Paige Pipkin of El Paso, Texas, who won the Bee in 1981 after finishing second the previous year. Pipkin, whose married name is Paige Kimble, is now Director of the National Spelling Bee program.

In order to help his concentration, Sean pretended to write each word with his finger on the back of his placard. “It helps me visualize the word, because a lot of times, especially if it’s a long word, I can’t see the whole thing in my head,” he said. “There are some words that I’m not sure about, and I just write them down to make sure. In the Minnesota bees, all the way up to the state level, you’re allowed to have a pad of paper and a pencil, and you can write them down there. In the national bee, of course, you can’t do that, but I just write them in the air and on my card to make sure I have them right.”

Sean struggled for an answer when asked what he would do with the $10,000 cash prize he gets for winning the Bee. “I’ll probably save it for… I don’t know how long,” he said. “Many years. Maybe I’ll save it for a car or an apartment. Maybe I’ll invest it in the stock market.” Sean, who has already written two computer video games, said he wants to be a computer programmer like his father Mike when he grows up.

In addition to using computers, Sean said he spends much of his free time studying other languages. “I’ve been learning Spanish for several years,” he said, “so that helped me with one of the words I got, ‘zarzuela,’ a Spanish word. I’ve also been learning French this year in school. And I’m from a German background, so I know a little bit of German and I could spell ‘schadenfreude.’”

Sean, who represented the San Francisco Examiner in the previous two National Spelling Bees, moved to Minnesota recently, where he won this year’s state bee while representing the Aitkin Independent Age. “We’ve moved twice in the last eight months, so he did lose a lot of study time that way,” said his mother, Bry Conley. “But it seems to work out anyway.”

A few other notable words from Thursday’s final rounds of competition:

-                     illth: the condition of being economically unprosperous or miserable, misspelled by Kristen Turner of Lawrenceburg, Ind.

-                     oligophrenia: mental deficiency or feeblemindedness, spelled correctly by Dennis Cole of Huntington, W. Va.

-                     encomium: A eulogy, spelled correctly by Jason Black of Livermore, Calif.

-                     sylph: A slender woman or girl of light and graceful carriage, misspelled by Bria Wash of Anderson, Indiana