Spelling Bees, blah blah, blah

I just can't get excited over another homeschooler winning the national spelling bee. Actually, I sort of dread my search feeds today as they'll be filled with homeschoolers crowing about it as though it proves something, and opponents also crowing about as though it proves something different.

It proves nothing. Any kid that gets to the national level in the spelling bee is by definition a little bit weird. It's simply not normal to care that much about spelling. For that matter, any kid that is a national level competitor in anything is a standard deviation or two outside of the mean. The time, effort, and often expense involved in becoming the best is something that very few people will really take on.

The "proof" that homeschooling works is not in the outliers, it's in all our normal kids leading normal lives. I'd make a plea to not make a big deal of the homeschooler aspect, but the people most likely to do that aren't reading here anyway. Most of my readers are at least as cynical as I am.