WASHINGTON - Even though Scott Remer hasn't participated in the Scripps National Spelling Bee since his 2008 fourth place finish, the Beachwood native still has plenty riding on the yearly competition.
In high school, the two-time Plain Dealer spelling bee winner wrote a 292-page guide on how to ace the national event, and provided it along with free tutoring to North Royalton's Anamika Veeramani, who won the 2010 title.
After that, Remer launched a paid tutoring service for spelling bee contestants who contact him through the website that sells his book. Five of his pupils made it into this year's Thursday night finals, televised on ESPN. They included the event's runner-up, Rohan Rajeev of Oklahoma, who won a $30,000 prize, and spellers who finished in 4th, 7th, and 12th places.
Remer watched the event from England, where he's studying for a University of Cambridge masters degree in Political Thought & Intellectual History and tutoring spelling bee contestants over the Internet. Afterward, he said he was proud his spellers showed poise onstage as they faced down "fairly tricky words."
"I'm particularly pleased with Rohan's performance, both because of the amazing endurance it took for him to battle it out in the championship finals for so long and under such intense pressure, and because of his relative lack of previous experience at the National Spelling Bee," said Remer. He said the competition's winner, California's Ananya Vinay, "did a stellar job," showing "supreme calm and profoundly wide-ranging knowledge of orthography and the English language."
Ohio's highest placed competitors this year were Owen Kovalik of Medina and Maggie Sheridan of Mansfield, who were tied for 23rd place. Kovalik said he was tutored by Dev Jaiswal, a fourth place finisher in the 2015 national bee who is an aficionado of Remer's book.
Remer says he decided to write the book as a way to synthesize and codify what he learned during two years of studying, "so it didn't dissipate or evaporate as time went on."
"It was a way that I could provide some kind of concrete closure and it was a way of giving back to the spelling bee community," Remer says.
Since his participation in the national event, Remer says speller preparedness has improved due to his book, which has sold about 3,000 copies; the increased availability of tutors; and new digital technologies that students use to practice spelling and figure out words they need to learn.
He says terms for foods, music, and rocks and minerals have been popular subject areas for recent spelling bee words. Remer also encourages study of word stems, like "anti" and "pre," their languages of origin and how they're used to build larger words.
He views spelling bee contestants as "word detectives" who figure out the correct spelling of words they've never seen through available information, like their definitions and parts of speech.
"Spelling is not primarily about rote memorization," says Remer. "It is about understanding the phonetic rules and the patterns behind different languages of origin, and internalizing those rules and the method of how to calmly, methodically, coolly dissect a word under pressure on stage and piece it back together. There is an art to that. A high drama."
In addition to giving students an appreciation for the beauty and subtlety of the English language, Remer says participating in the spelling bee is a character building experience that teaches kids self-discipline and grace under pressure.
"In the end, the national spelling bee is these kids against the dictionary," says Remer. "That is the real competition."