::: Go Akeelah Go =) :::

Eleven year old African-American Akeelah Anderson comes from a working class family living in South Los Angeles. Akeelah is a bright girl, especially when it comes to words, but finds life at poor Crenshaw Middle School boring and unchallenging, so she doesn't try. Her life is not easy as her father is dead, her mom ignores her, her brother runs with the local gangbangers. She's smart, but her environment threatens to strangle her aspirations. But her natural aptitude for words spurs the school administrators, led by Principal Welch, to convince her to try out for the process of the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Akeelah, already feeling isolated from many in her school because of being perceived as a "brainiac", feels that participating in such will make her feel even more isolated. But her joy in learning new words at least gets her started in the process. After easily winning the school's spelling bee, she meets and befriends Javier Mendez, a competitor at the Los Angeles district bee where most of the competitors come from primarily white middle class to wealthy families. There, she learns about the nature of spelling bee life in all its good and bad, the latter which includes the cutthroat world of competitor parents.

Akeelah learns she needs a coach, hers to be in the form of former spelling bee competitor and UCLA English Department Chair Dr. Joshua Larabee, who teaches Akeelah not only the rote memorization of typical spelling bee words, but how to use English in all its glorious facets. Akeelah progresses further and further into spelling bee life without telling her widowed mother Tanya, who sees the bees as impinging into time in her other school work.

So, as a teacher, we have to understand our students better. They have different learning styles and it is our job to figure out what is the best for them or we need to study how our students learn instead of asking them why they cannot cope or fail in certain subjects.