The regional Spanish Spelling earlier this month concluded with senior Isabel Perez Bedia being the first Mac student to move up to the State competition this coming summer in El Paso, Texas.
Q1: How did it feel to go to regionals for the spelling bee?
I was excited because I wasn’t able to go to regionals last year; it was pretty exciting, it was the first time I was there.
Q2: What was it like being able to have this experience your Senior year?
Again, it was real exciting, since it’s my last year. I thought it was a great opportunity for me to gain prestige as a student because Spanish Language & literature is the major I want to pursue, so I think that’s a very good way to show my skills in that field.
Q3: How did you prepare for the spelling bee?
Both for the district spelling bee and the original spelling bee, something I did was grabbing sticky notes writing words that I didn’t know or I was struggling with and I put them all over the walls on my bedroom, that way I would see them every day and that really helped me to memorize the words and keep them in mind. I have learned that I am a visual learning person, I learn things better when I can see them. That’s my major technique for learning words. And now for this next spelling bee, what I’m gonna do is making sure that I know the whole list and then I’ll keep learning new words because something that happened in this last spelling bee is that we got some words that were not in the list, so it gets more challenging each time, and I know It’s gonna be way more challenging when I’m in stage [for state].
Q4: What would you tell people that want to get into the spelling bee but haven’t?
So, for people who want to try spelling bee, I really encourage them to do it. Even if you’re a native Spanish speaker or you’re not, you can do it anyway, because a very nice experience that I had in the district spelling bee was a middle school kid and you could tell that he was Hispanic but he spoke Spanish with an accent from [American] English; so, you could tell it wasn’t actually his first language. He did wonderfully, it was so amazing, really difficult words for a middle schooler, and he spelled them all perfectly except for one and he still won the competition after that and went to regionals. If you don’t think you can do it, just challenge yourself and be confident. If you study, you can do it
Q5: Is there anything else you want to say about the spelling bee?
It was interesting. It was exciting. I really didn’t think that I’d be able to win because I was like ‘I won’t be able to pass from here, here are the best people from San Antonio, I won’t be able to do it.’ But I was, and I am really happen about this accomplishment.
