Angel
Angelo is not hoping to benefit from “schadenfreude” Wednesday, but if he’s asked to spell it, he’ll be ready.
Schadenfreude is a German word meaning deriving pleasure from the misfortune of others – and Angelo, a fifth-grader at Two Rivers Elementary School, has learned it while studying for the Central Valley Spelling Bee to be held Wednesday.
The 10-year-old will be tested on his ability to spell from a list containing many hundreds of words, not only of English origin but of Latin, Arabic, German, Japanese, French, Slavic, Dutch, Asian and other languages.
“Pfeffernuss” is on the list, as are “mukhtar,” “Qatari," "blitzkrieg” and “tahini.” He won Two Rivers’ campus Spelling Bee, in a head-to-head showdown with classmate Khushbu Adhikari, by spelling “hoi polloi,” a Greek word meaning “ordinary people.”
Angelo is one of 66 fourth- through eighth-graders from Sacramento, Placer, El Dorado, Yolo, Solano and Sutter counties who will square off for the right to represent this region at the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington D.C. in May.
To prepare for the Central Valley competition, Angelo said he has been reading a dictionary and getting quizzed by relatives. “Not all the words come easy because sometimes I have mistakes,” he said, recalling that he lost a school spelling bee last year by stumbling on “purification.”
“He’s amazing,” said his teacher, Courtnay Kaump, who said two classroom aides have been grilling Angelo on a regular basis and that he appears to know all but about a dozen words on a list of perhaps 1,400. “When he doesn’t know a word, he comes back the next day knowing how to spell it,” Kaump said.
To reach Wednesday's six-county competition, Angelo had to survive not only Two Rivers' contest but a written exam designed to cull the regional list of campus winners.
Kaump said that at the beginning of the year, she asked students what they like to do in their spare time. “His answer was, ‘I like to study maps,’” she said of Angelo, who is an excellent student and won the school’s Geography Bee, too.
Though he knows many words, Angelo doesn’t use many of them in interviews about himself. Asked how he felt after winning school spelling honors, he said simply: “I was happy,” and that “I practiced a lot.”
Principal Leslie Sargent called Angelo “a very good student and a really nice and conscientious boy.”
Angelo's spelling skills will serve him well throughout his life, Sargent said. “Spelling is important because he’ll have to write things his whole life. If you know how to spell words off the top of your head, it just makes it so much easier. It’s something that will benefit him from here on out.”
