Kavya Shivasankar doesn’t want a cell phone, and she doesn’t like the makeup applied for television appearances that began early Friday, the morning after she spelled “Laodicean” to win the 2009 Scripps National Spelling Bee.
The 13-year-old from Olathe, Kans., likes her violin, Indian dancing, swimming, biking, playing with her little sister Vanya and spelling, of course.
“I’m going to really miss spelling this next year because it’s such a big part of my life,” Kavya said Friday.
One of the kids in our church was the last one standing against Miss Shivasankar in the local finals — there is now some well-deserved pride in having lost out to the national champion.
There’s a lot to like about the upcoming generation of youth born between about 1982 and about 2005 or so, for they are our times’ equivalent of the GI Greatest Generation. Please pray for them all. Please invest your time in them. And above all, please do everything possible — VBS, anyone? — to strengthen them in their Christian faith against the secular post-modernist piffle shoved down their throats by my own (our own?) self-absorbed reprobate Baby Boomers now in charge of what passes for education.
Amen, #1.
Guess Miss Shivasankar pays attention to Episcopal follies and visits our friendly ‘neighborhood pub’, the MCJ, owned by our esteemed and witty host, Christopher Johnson.
Why else would Laodicean be right on the tip of her tongue?