School ended more than two weeks ago for 11-year-old Luis Orlando Ruiz Medina.
Outside of his family's North Austin apartment, a few neighbors called to each other. A few buildings over, the apartment pool must've been full. But, for Luis, this was all at a pause.
The winner of the Pflugerville Spanish Spelling Bee in December, Luis knows that this is the final stretch. On June 26, the soon-to-be sixth-grader and recent Copperfield Elementary School graduate will be off to nationals in El Paso. He'll be the only representative from Central Texas.
From his laptop screen, Doris Espinoza, a parent liaison at Copperfield and the student’s spelling coach, read through a list.
“Recopilación ... reflexión ... redacción."
Previously: Pflugerville student won the Spanish language spelling bee with this word. Up next: nationals
As Espinoza had taught him, Luis asked that each word be repeated. He requested it be used in a sentence, then to hear its definition. His tone was steady and confident.
As he listened, he wrote out each word in pencil in a small plastic booklet.
For the first 31 minutes, the 11 year-old spelled out more than 40 words without fail. The word “tasador,” Spanish for “appraiser,” finally tricked him.
“With an ‘S,’ Luis,” Espinoza said in Spanish.
For the final 10 minutes, he was perfect.
Luis began to prepare in the fall for the district bee at the recommendation of his teachers.A competitive kid, he didn’t do as well in the training as he expected, in part because of the technicalities of the competition. He had to stop himself from saying “uve” as opposed to “ve chica” to say the letter V, for example.In Spanish, both names for the letter are accepted, and the preferred name varies by country.
Twice a week, for the final 45 minutes of the day, the group of 12 students under Espinoza’s tutelage learned new words and their definitions. They played memory games and copied words in efforts of rote learning.
With reading club, Duolingo German and Chinese streaks he insisted on keeping, and a steady amount of geometry homework that challenged him, Luis' mother, Deilys Medina, said she recalled him studying through the afternoons until 9 at night, regularly. His eyes grew red.
“We’re human beings,” Medina told him in Spanish. “You can’t do it all."
Luis figured he’d quit the spelling training. But after his mother suggested he try sticking with it, he asked his friends in the reading club if they would slow their pace. He declined, melancholically, the opportunity to join an art club.
In November, a month before the Pflugerville district bee, Espinoza reduced the group of 12 Copperfield students practicing for the competition to four based on a test. Luis barely made the cut. Espinoza told him so.
After that, though, Espinoza noticed Luis surged. He excelled in the mock competitions on stage, where the students emulated the district competition’s rules. Luis said it’s because he began to study more, and because he wanted to make his parents proud. Through the evening hours, he read words aloud, closed his eyes and tried to spell them.
“Cúspide. … Deshuesar.”
Luis won the district competition in December. He continued practicing through the spring semester with Espinoza. And when summer came, he accepted her offer to practice daily in the run-up to the competition.
It’s become fun, he said. Not only because he's more comfortable with it now, but because of the conversations he has with Espinoza — about the reptiles he will see in El Paso, her German family, and the cities of the world.
A new way to keep Spanish
For the children of Spanish-speaking parents, and for immigrants like Luis himself, maintaining one’s Spanish can be difficult.
On the playgrounds, in the nature television documentaries and within Percy Jackson young adult books, is English.
Luis has been in bilingual education classes since he began prekindergarten in 2017, the year his family moved to Austin from Cienfuegos, Cuba. But about two ago, Medina noticed that her son was losing his Spanish.
She caught his grammar mistakes, his stumble upon reaching certain words.
Luis too remembers this. It frightened him.
“When I noticed that, I didn’t want to forget,” he said in Spanish. “It’s the language I grew up speaking, it’s the language of my country, and that my family speaks.”
He began to read more in Spanish. On trips back to visit family in Cuba, the family bought books on the history of Havana and “Cuba’s Provinces.” At the Scholastic book fair, Luis picked out Spanish-language books on the histories of World War II and the Vietnam War.
This reading, Luis believes, helped form his edge in spelling. The determination he’s developed through his studying has elevated it.
How many words can one remember?
On Thursday, flipping through the 117-page booklet with more than 1,200 official words for the national competition — along with their definitions and sentences — Luis shrugged.
How many of these words would he remember?
Sure, he has found words that are so splendidly long and delightful, like “otorrinolaringólogo” (Spanish for an ear, nose, and throat doctor), that he is sure he won’t forget them. But others, he has wondered how much he will use.
Espinoza, though, said she is confident that preparing for the spelling bee has helped Luis firm his understanding of Spanish. A better speller is a better reader and writer, two components that can often slip from heritage language speakers.
“A lot of people (in the U.S.) know how to speak Spanish, but they don’t know how to write it or read it. And that’s important,” she said in Spanish.
Luis isn’t sure where Spanish will take him. He’s unsure what he wants to do when he grows older. Maybe he’ll be a biologist, to study the animals that he loves seeing on TV.
For now, his exploration will come with the words he is repeating and beginning to make sense of:
“Guatemalteco … Inmigración ... Maricaibo … Vaquero ...”
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Pflugerville student prepares for 2024 National Spanish Spelling Bee
