BOY WINS COUNTY SPELLING BEE FOR FOURTH TIME.Byline: ANNE CONSTABLE Eighth-grader was state runner-up last 3 years By Anne Constable The New Mexican Rajat Singh, a student at the Academy for Technology and the Classics ATC is a public charter school in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Education Program and Philosophy The Academy for Technology and the Classics charter school seeks to provide a classical and technology-based approach to education. , won the Santa Fe County spelling bee for the fourth time Thursday by correctly spelling the word for a Japanese immigrant that frequently crops up in crossword puzzles (issei) and a popular vegetable with a knotty name (zucchini). Raj, as he is known, beat out 28 other contestants at the Genoveva Chavez Community Center and will represent the county at the state competition in March. He was runner-up there in each of the last three years. "Hopefully this year he wins state and goes to Washington" for the Scripps National Spelling Bee, said the seventh-grader's father, Ganesh Singh. Fiona Jensen-Hitch, a sixth-grader at Gonzales Community School, was second in the county bee; Cassidy Hart, a sixth-grader at Turquoise Trail Elementary School, finished third. The contest is open to students in grades 1-8 as well as to those who are home-schooled. The words this year were hard from the get-go, according to Raj's English teacher, Dana Johnson, who added that he is "way smarter on this than me." The other words Raj spelled correctly included kirtle kir·tle n. Archaic 1. A man's knee-length tunic or coat. 2. A woman's dress or skirt. [Middle English kirtel, from Old English cyrtel (a tunic worn in the Middle Ages), mercerize mer·cer·ize tr.v. mer·cer·ized, mer·cer·iz·ing, mer·cer·iz·es To treat (cotton thread) with sodium hydroxide so as to shrink the fiber and increase its luster and affinity for dye. , sassafras sassafras: see laurel. sassafras North American tree (Sassafras albidum) of the laurel family. The aromatic leaf, bark, and root are used as a flavouring, as a traditional home medicine, and as a tea. , forsythia forsythia (fôrsĭth`ēə), common name for any member of the small genus Forsythia of the family Oleaceae (olive family), European and Asian shrubs with abundant bell-shaped yellow flowers that appear before the leaves. , character, cachet cachet /ca·chet/ (ka-sha´) a disk-shaped wafer or capsule enclosing a dose of medicine. ca·chet n. An edible wafer capsule used for enclosing an unpleasant-tasting drug. , bayou, apricot, zinnia zinnia, any species of the genus Zinnia of the family Asteraceae (aster family), native chiefly to Mexico, though some range as far north as Colorado and as far south as Guatemala. The common zinnia of gardens (Z. , talc and angst. Raj memorizes the spelling of words for two hours a night. "After a while you get used to it. Two hours isn't that much," he said. He said he looks on the Internet, reads "whatever I can find," and studies the dictionary. He's also working his way through a list of about 30,000 words on the National Spelling Bee's Web site (spellingbee.com). He figures he's learned about 10,000 so far. Raj first learned about the spelling bee when he was at Pi[+ or -]on Elementary School. He tried out and found, "I was really good at it." Now 12, he said he only makes a mistake "when the pressure gets to me." One word he isn't likely to trip on a second time is dehiscence dehiscence /de·his·cence/ (de-his´ins) a splitting open. wound dehiscence separation of the layers of a surgical wound. de·his·cence n. , which stumped him in the state competition in 2006 when he was still a fourth-grader. In biology it means the release of materials by the splitting open of an organ or tissue; in botany the natural bursting open of capsules, fruits, etc., or in medicine the opening of a surgically closed wound. Contact Anne Constable at 986-3022 or aconstable@sfnewmexican.com. |
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