Eighth grader wins New Mexico State Spelling Bee for second time in three years

For hours, they fought hard and, with the ding of the bell, dropped like flies — bested by words most people won’t hear in a lifetime. It ended in dramatic fashion Saturday as two eighth graders, barely tall enough to see over the microphone, went back and forth misspelling words until one of them got it right.

In the end, Keith Lee, 13, bested Joshua Bala, 14, for first place by correctly spelling puparium, a rigid outer shell formed from the larval skin that covers some pupae, and verbigerate, the action of repeating a word or sentence endlessly and meaninglessly.

It marked Lee’s second time earning the title of champion in the New Mexico State Spelling Bee, having also won in 2023.

“It’s just so many emotions... It just really showed to me how much I can achieve just by working hard,” Lee, a second language English speaker from Albuquerque Academy, told the Journal.

Lee’s parents, Po-Hsuen Lee and Yi-Hsuan Chang, said it’s been impressive to watch him juggle baseball practices and math contests while studying for the bee. “But that’s Keith,” Po-Hsuen Lee said, “always pushing himself.”

In late May, Lee will head to the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C.

Bala, from Mandela International Magnet School in Santa Fe, took second place after misspelling graveolent, while Hannah Li, a seventh grader at Los Alamos Middle School, took third after correctly spelling mediatrix in an elimination round.

Bala said he was “really unsure” of himself when they reached the dictionary words but was proud to take second place — especially after briefly forgetting how to spell quattrocento much earlier, in round 10.

“I was really close to getting it wrong, but I remembered it at the last minute,” he said. Devi Bala, Bala’s mother, said with a laugh, “I just wanted to leave the room because I couldn’t handle the stress.”

Li, who won second place in the 2023 state bee, said you can’t really prepare for the dictionary words, of which there are 470,000. “You just have to ask for the origin and then guess,” she said.

Buzz words

The contest began at 9 a.m. in an upstairs auditorium at the headquarters of the Albuquerque Journal, which sponsors the bee. Twenty-five students from schools statewide went head-to-head.

By round 25, only four remained after several students were thwarted by Gallic, boudin and velouté. In Round 31, organizers announced they were switching from the Scripps list of words to Merriam-Webster, eliciting a nervous smile from Li to her father in the audience.

When it came down to Bala and Lee, the pair couldn’t get a word right to catch an edge, misspelling pallescent, canasta, panforte, rubrofugal, banket, gaffsail, xeric, pipit, chancel and Sochi.

Lee said he learned to calm himself in such moments by meditation, taking deep breaths and “force a smile, because that just makes you feel less stressed, and it also puts you in a positive mood.”

Heading into this bee, Lee said he learned to not set too high of expectations, something he will carry through life.

“Like, I could say I want to graduate from college at 13, and I want to earn whatever amount of money and send the first human to Neptune,” Lee said. “But really ... to just set your expectations low, not low to where you just feel lazy and don’t really try hard enough, but not to the point where you feel overwhelmed ... and doubt how well you can do in these situations.”

Last year’s state champion who reached the national quarterfinals, Juliette Anderson, was on the other side of the table this time around, as an audio recorder. She said she found it funny to “not be nervous” at a bee, but she was still spelling the words in her head the whole time.

Anderson said she misses studying words and preparing for the state bee, saying there’s “a hole” in her life where that once was. A poet, she said she has written many poems about how much she misses the competition and community.

The national bee was one of the best experiences of her life, she said, adding, “I just really felt like I belonged there.”

Anderson still relishes the tough words, and she easily rattles off one of her favorites: Makgadikgadi Pans, a salt pan in the dry savanna of Botswana.