Middle School Latin Teacher and Middle School World & Classical Languages Department Chair Margaret Kelleher ’01 wanted a win. “In all the years we’ve been doing this,” she says with a sigh when talking about the Middle School Spelling Bee, “I’ve never won anything.” Not that she was up on the stage spelling increasingly complex words, but her advisory students were, and she was always right there in the audience of Hauser Auditorium, rooting hard for them. This year, however, would be different. This year, there was Ayden Chang ’31.

Ayden Chang is one of those students who keeps his teachers on their toes. No, he’s not disrupting the class. He’s not dozing off in the back row. Rather, Ayden is, perpetually, one step ahead. “Ayden is an incredible thinker,” says his advisor Ms. Kelleher, who taught him last year in Latin A. “He is a kid who figures out the lesson you’re trying to teach before you even get partway through teaching it.”

For the first rounds of the Bee, the students competed in their respective advisories, and whenever Ms. Kelleher gave Ayden a word, she watched as he carefully turned it over in his mind. “He would ask, ‘Origin?’, and I might say, ‘Latin’, because most of the words in the spelling bee are, and you could see the wheels kind of turn in his head as he made those connections.” Having studied the origin of words in Ms. Kelleher’s class, he was now calling on those lessons for the Bee. “It’s something we studied in class,” she says, “knowing the roots and seeing how words come together.”

After the Spelling Bee winners emerged from the advisory rounds, Ayden competed onstage in Hauser, with the event extending into two days because the competition was so fierce. The words became more challenging. “There are some words that he knew that I thought ‘wow, I didn’t even know that word’—and I know a lot of words!” Ms. Kelleher was sitting near two English teachers when Ayden was challenged to spell the word “maquisards.” (Origin? French. Definition? A guerrilla fighter in the French underground during World War II) Ms. Kelleher saw her winning advisory hopes dissipating. “The three of us just looked at each other, and I thought, ‘okay, if the three of us don’t know this word…’ And then,” she said, seemingly still surprised, “he just… rattled it off.”

After that, Ayden emerged as the one to beat.

In the next round, he was given the word “delectation,” which he considered far easier than “maquisards.” As they approached the final round, it was down to three students, and when they misspelled their words, Ayden was given the word “extremophile”. (“It’s an animal that can live in harsh environments,” he explains. “I read that word somewhere in an article.”) After he spelled it correctly, it was time for the Championship word: monolithic. “I just pieced it together,” he says nonchalantly. “It has some Greek parts, like ‘mono’ and ‘lith’. The mono part means ‘one’ and the lith part means ‘stone.’

Ms. Kelleher’s advisory was ready. “They knew, as soon as he got the Championship word of monolithic, I thought, ‘we got this!’ We knew Ayden was gonna rock that. We knew if he could get Maquisards? He can get monolithic. So we all were standing and cheering and jumping up and down—our whole group. That was our plan.” Ayden’s win was not just a win for word connoisseurs but, finally, a win for Ms. Kelleher’s entire advisory. “The whole group got to feel like they’re winners. I feel like I’m a winner! I never won a single advisory activity in all these years, so this is my one,” she says with a laugh. “It’s nice and it builds a little bit of camaraderie.” Even as the cheering died down, one of Ms. Kelleher’s sixth-grade students could be heard exclaiming of Ayden, “That’s my Latin tutor! He helps me with my homework!”

Now, Ayden is preparing for the Spelling Bee Regionals competition, which will be held at SOPAC on March 8, and he will be studying from a list of no less than 4,000 words. In his typically calm demeanor, Ayden predicts, “I think it will be a little more difficult.”

But Ms. Kelleher thinks he’s got a shot. “We are very lucky to have Ayden in our school,” she says. “He’s a brilliant young man.”

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To contact the author: Sara Courtney

Photo by: Chris Birrittella '28