Yes Martha, I was on the spelling team... ..in sixth grade, the local schools in the area organized to have a spelling bowl competition. At the school I attended, the elementary teachers had a competition over the course of several weeks to determine who would be our reps, and I made it on the team.
The competition was held in a hot, stuffy middle school gym-slash-auditorium (you know you've seen those gyms with a stage at one end, this was one of them) in a small town about 30 miles away. The competition itself took 8 rounds, with each school sending up one speller per round. I was one of the later members of our team to go, sixth or seventh, I believe, but not last. Last was reserved for your strongest person, and I wasn't that, though I've forgotten who else was on the team.
They gave you a sheet with eight blank lines, and the moderator would read one word at a time and gave you a certain amount of time to write the word out. I believe I got seven of the eight correct, maybe I missed two, but one I remember quite clearly.
My handwriting is, and has always been, patently awful, so much so that a few years thereafter I took to printing my words almost exclusively, and that still hasn't abolished the brutal nature of my "penmanship" (as my second grade teacher liked to call handwriting, usually preceded by the word "bad" in my case.) But you couldn't print in this competition, they made you write, and I took much care in making my spelling legible. But on the word "bureau," the proctor assigned to me thought the "B" looked like an "L." Apparently I preceded myself somehow, as two of the proctors preceded to harang about this being "our visually impaired student," apparently ready to perhaps cut me some slack. I dreaded the controversy that might ensue, though, and assured the proctor that it was indeed an "L," even though I knew I'd never had any intention of spelling it that way.
I followed that up by getting lost trying to find the men's restroom, which, you might know, is not one of the better things to lose yourself finding.
The moral of this story is? Good writing equals good health. And, it was a decent excuse to tell another children's story.
3:21:13 PM 
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