Newcomb girl credits ʻtiger momʼ for bee win
SHIPROCK
Navajo Times/Cindy Yurth Hannah May, right, reacts as Amika Rylin Lee incorrectly spells “cauliflower,” leaving May the winner of the Shiprock Agency Spelling Bee and Lee and runner-up. May then correctly spelled “sitzmark” to win the bee.
Tiger moms get a bad rap. But sometimes itʼs good to have one.
“Itʼs all because of my tiger mom,” Hannah May, a sixth-grader at Newcomb Middle School, said after winning the Shiprock Agency Spelling Bee last Thursday.
May said her mother, Newcomb High School teacher Gloria Pengosro, “really pushed me.”
But May discovered a little something on her own, too. Sheʼs an aural learner.
“If I look at a word, I can read it a hundred times and it wonʼt sink in,” she said. “But if I say a word while Iʼm looking at it, I can get it after one or two times.”
May bested schoolmate Amika Rylin Lee, who had won the eighth-grade competition, in the seventh round of the finals when Lee put an extra ingredient in cauliflower — a second “l” — and May didnʼt slip on “sitzmark,” the indentation a skierʼs posterior leaves in the snow when he falls.
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