Well, yes it was.
The Ohio Small School Quiz Bowl State Final was recently held in Upper Sandusky High School, Upper Sandusky, OH. No, not Sandusky–that’s Cedar Point and all that– Upper Sandusky, county seat of Wyandot County, where the last Native American reservation in Ohio was located. You might be forgiven for thinking that the school teams would be named the “Indians”, but you would be wrong; they are the “Rams”, having , apparently, decided long ago that such ethnnic references were not good and picked something more easily depicted in cartoon-like mode.
Anyway, there were small schools from all over, some we’d heard of, many, not so much. Cloverleaf and Southeast are in our local league (Portage), Bristol and Salem are sorta in the neighborhood, Lakewood is, at least, recognizable. Then they headed out–Toledo Christian, Toledo Arts( both charter schools), Ottawa Hills( Toledo area)–and really came from “a fur piece”; that would be places like Zane Trace (Chillicothe), Miami Valley (private, Dayton), Riverdale (Blanchard, listed in U.S. News top schools, great basketball teams), MVCDS (Maumee Valley Country Day School–Toledo), Indian Lake (North Lewiston, by Indian Lake St. Park), Batavia ( clear down by Cincinnati, little bitty place, county seat of Clermont County)and Us, the Garfield G-Men, a pretty renowned crowd too. Our bus/van trip took about two-and-a-half hours; heaven only knows how long some of these folks were on the road, although some of them had pretty direct interstate options. Upper Sandusky is right off of U.S. 30 and the territory out there is flat, flat, flat, so the most treacherous geography was here around home. Don’t make me get into the lesson on “landforms of Ohio”–too, too seventh grade.
So, as I was saying, the weather didn’t have much effect on our trip…unless you count the overnight snow on Friday and the white-outs coming home on Saturday evening…nothing much. Bus/van driver kept saying, “Mother Nature seems to have gone bi-polar on us.” Sunny and breezy one minute–still cold–then snowing and dark the next. Windy too, could really be felt as we were tootling along and sudden blast after sudden blast would rock the vehicle. Kids hardly noticed–in the morning because they were still half asleep, coming home, because they were in “chatter mode” and talking a blue streak most of the time–relief, I guess.
So, anyhow, just understanding the questions in these NAQT affairs is the first challenge. In the math ones, I’m having trouble comprehending the terms, let alone what’s supposed to be done with them and how to express the answers. My official shirt says on the back, “Listen to the Question.” (I left off the “Dammit”), and that’s the first thing to get right, that and buzzing in ASAP. The topics of the questions range from Victorian literature to current events, from internal medicine & physiology to online games and music. Some political questions pop up, items from sports records, teams and players to Olympic gold medalists appear, lines of poetry are clues; it is an across-the-board challenge, every round. Speed is of the essence, but so is accuracy; an answer can be disallowed simply for being given as a plural instead of a singular, a king or an emperor or some such ruler with the wrong regnal number (Henry VIII instead of Henry VII, for instance, or the wrong one of the Georges) doesn’t cut it. Names are another challenge, particularly really old ones. And the non-English names! Oy! Just having a reader who can pronounce them correctly is a blessing…also kind of rare in some cases. The ones at this fandango were pretty good, over-all.
So there we were, up for the challenge and rolling along, everyone contributing answers, either individually (and getting ranked for it) or in consultation to get the bonuses. Worked fine until the very last competition, which was with Toledo Arts Academy, a charter school with a real ace who took, I think it was, the first five questions (with their accompanying bonuses), to start off the match and went on from there.. Then we were playing catch-up…which we almost did, in spite of all that. It was a heckuva match, a good one, but they got us, fair and square, then went on to take the title.
The Mighty G-Men came away with the top standing in the very small school division and one of the top ten individual scorers in the entire meet. Varsity team members at the competition included Jack Rado, Cameron Edwards, Rene Fenshaw, Cass Swenson, Lillian Kercher; team members unable to attend included Katey Cisney, Emma Huter and Ellie Shay; they deserve credit too, a team doesn’t get to be good unless practices and competitions are an over-all effort, you know, a TEAM.
P.S. Thanks to our driver, Shelly, too; she got us there and back in good shape and ready to give it the “old school try,”
