Since the team had to have people with a range of GPAs, slackers like me were like a secret weapon.
This conversation made me look up 2006's winners. My school no longer competes (we won States for 17 years in a row, then the coaches retired and nobody kept it up. Sigh.) but the Mississippi winners last year had a Scholastic (kid with an average GPA of 3.0-3.75) who got the fourth highest score in the nation, apparently. Brought the team to 7th overall in the nation, and 1st in their division ("Medium" sized schools). I was impressed.
(I'm also feeling like the only Buffista who wasn't in AD, but if my school or state had had it, I would've been! Really!)
I don't think my school thought knowledge was competitive. I'd never heard of these competitions till recently. I graduated high school in '79, so maybe I predate these things?
I don't think we had any of these things when I was in high school, or my school didn't participate. I was in AP English senior year, so I feel like my teacher would have encouraged us to do it otherwise.
Possibly I was too busy smoking out in the parking lot.
I was in AP English senior year, so I feel like my teacher would have encouraged us to do it otherwise
Oh, yeah, if Mr. Berryhill had had a way to show off his star students, he'd have done it.
I graduated high school in '79, so maybe I predate these things?
I just checked the website -- Academic Decathlon started in 1981.
The only knowledge-based competition I can recall from my high school was the Math team. Not quite the same as the stuff you folks mentioned...
ok. if you ever get the chance to see Nancy Pearl, the author of
Book Lust
and
More Book Lust,
speak, GO. very entertaining. even if you are a really picky reader she 's got stuff for you. and Besides - she is the only Librarian I know , other than BatGirl, that has her own action figure.
[link]
and the action figure
[link]
Random nugget I stumbled upon that's old but perhaps not old news.
Anthony Minghella's rather excellent film adaptation of Samuel Beckett's Play.
[link]
Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, “Against the Day,” reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes. It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex.
Review is by Michiko Kakutani, so adjust your rhetorical filters accordingly.
I just saw that Jack Williamson died [link] I had started to hope he was going to live forever. He was such a nice guy.
