For the moment, Clara Wicoff’s life is like an absurd Dr. Seuss story. Think alphabet soup with words and letters floating about. She goes to brush her teeth, and there affixed to the mirror is a sticky note with the words theodolite, theosophize, therblig. When she gets a snack from the refrigerator another sticky note greets her with the words tawdry, tazza, technophobia and telamon.
Most nights she falls asleep spelling words. But even sleep gives her no respite. Her dreams are fraught with nightmares of judges asking her nonsensical words that can’t be spelled correctly.
For Clara, 13, it’s all part of the preparation for this weekend’s state spelling bee in Great Bend where she will be representing Allen County for the fourth year in a row.
The last couple of months have been crunch time for Clara and her mother/coach, Lisa, who drills Clara on thousands of words from their “bible,” a 349-page consolidated word list prepared for the national spelling bee.
“We’ve been through it three times,” over the past month, Lisa said.
“I don’t know S through W so well,” Clara said. They plan to plow through the tome one more time before Saturday’s contest.
Two years ago Clara won the Sunflower Spelling Bee in Great Bend and made it to the E.W. Scripps National Spelling Bee near Washington, D.C. That year she dedicated about 300 hours to studying for the bee. From that competition Clara joined a “word-a-holics” LISTSERV that sends weekly word lists to students over the Internet.
The national bee was an eye-opener to the backgrounds of some of her fellow competitors. “Many are home-schooled,” Clara said, with a focus solely on making it to the national competition. “And their parents don’t let them have any fun,” she said of her peers with overbearing parents.
This year’s national bee is June 1-2, a week later than the usual Memorial Day weekend, which was chosen in honor of the date the dictionary great Merriam Webster died.
Clara is by nature a very organized person. On her computer’s desk top items are arranged by folders. Her planner, “is very specific” as to the day’s activities, her mother said. A box of index cards stores words that have posed as challenges.
When she studies the word list, she does so alphabetical.ly. No jumping around from anthracite to tanzanite. On Friday afternoon she and her mother were in the “Ts,” where Clara rattled off multi-syllabic words in a staccato-like fashion. It’s only when she stumbles on a word that she takes the time to look up the word’s etymology to help solidify it in her memory bank. She uses a subscription-only unabridged Merriam-Webster Dictionary available on the Internet as a source. Besides being fun to use, the online dictionary provides all kinds of helpful hints to learn a word such as rhymes, how the word is used by authors or in famous quotations.
Clara said her tools for learning — including the voluminous word list, a spelling rules book and the Valerie’s Spelling Bee Supplement — are invaluable.
“If our house burned down, those are what I would miss most,” she said.
As testament, for the last several of her birthdays she has requested the learning aids.
To help her concentrate during Saturday’s bee Clara said she will focus on a spot on a distant wall. That focus becomes so intense, she said, that she becomes unaware of anything else but her study of the word and its possible spelling.
CONTRARY TO WHAT you might think, spelling is not Clara’s life. The seventh-grader is just as busy with 4-H, Scholars Bowl, choir and dance. She’s particularly excited about a History Day project she and classmate Abigail Taylor are working on.
“It’s about the fight over water rights between Kansas and Colorado,” she said. She and Taylor plan to talk with former Kansas governor John Carlin about the dispute. Carlin is now a professor of political science at Kansas State University.
So, OK. Clara is precocious.
Asked what she wants to be when she grows up, she takes a while to respond.
“I want to make a difference,” she said thoughtfully. “I want to do something that actually does something, if that makes sense. Maybe be a psychiatrist or a school principal.”
When she recently took a career test, all areas came through pointing to the role of “manager.” Whether at a McDonald’s or Boeing aircraft, Clara should be in the role of a decision-maker, the test said.
Still, Clara is a typical teenager who contends with a typical family including brothers Isaiah, 11, Henry, 8, and Luke, 5.
Open the door any evening in the Wicoff household and you’re likely to find dad, Joel, playing his electric guitar “with the amp turned up high,” said Lisa, with a grimace, which only serves to further excite the Wicoff boys to “tear around,” Clara said.
“The only way there’s some peace is when Dad and the boys gather to watch reruns of ‘Dukes of Hazard,’” Lisa said.
Clara will get her revenge.
“The whole way to Great Bend I’ll be spelling words,” Clara said of the four-hour drive.
“It’ll drive him crazy.”
