Hey, this brown kid won the National Spelling Bee. Another brown kid won last year, so I did a quick survey of the ethnicities of the contestants to look for patterns. This is what I found (I clicked to see every image and read up a bit to get clues for the ambiguous):
White, 167
Brown, 24
Arab, 4
Latino, 14
Black, 4
Asian, 29
Mixed, 5
Pacific Islander, 2
I put Southeast Asians with the East Asians under the “Asian” category-including Filipinos with Latin last names. Most of the mixed seemed Eurasian. A lot of Asian adoptees (European names) were in among the contestants.
Go see the contestants here.
Update from Jason M: Hey kids, get out your calipers – the New York Times muses on the Geography Bee gender gap:
With students left to their own devices, a geography gender gap has become evident, so wide that with five million students participating in the bee, about 77 percent of the school winners are boys…
…Why the geography gap endures, some researchers say, has something to do with the fact that most schools are still not teaching the subject, and something to do with the toys geared toward boys and other social influences.
But mostly, they say, the gap stems from cognitive differences that give boys better spatial skills than girls. The same advantages that help boys in the geography bee make them, in general, better at navigation and finding their way.
[via Chris Brand]
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