Smartypants Competition

Breaking news: my son's academic team won their first match by a score of 61 to 8. I'd say that's a respectable showing. The other team, hereafter referred to as The Pitifuls, were not very competitive. In fact, you might say they were pitiful. I don't think they rang in ONCE the entire match. They got their points on the second-chance answer when our team got one wrong. The poor, poor Pitifuls. When the buzzer sounded to end the match, they clapped, and one softly uttered, "Yay!" I suppose they'd had a bellyfull of losing. Better luck next match--as long as it's not against US.

Pardon me while I brag for a bit. My #1 son was a starter. It was him and three 8th graders. My boy is in 7th grade, but he is bigger than all the other 10 members of the team, except for the basketball-playing classmate of his. I daresay he is smarter, too, because size doesn't count on the academic team. Their coach rotated the players, leaving one 8th grader in the entire match. "That's because she is the best, Mom," my son told me. I would rank him at #2 or #3 in the pecking order. There was another boy who earned about as many points as him, but he also gave more wrong answers than my boy. HH got there in time for 4th quarter to start. There had been a mix-up in the times, a mix-up that nobody noticed until 3:00. My boy called me after school to say that the starting time was 3:30, not 4:30, as had been listed on their schedule that they brought home before Christmas. Lucky for HH, the little genius also got to play 4th quarter.

They are just kids. I had a good time honing my Trivia skills. I tried not to appear flabbergasted when they said that the language spoken by most Quebec residents is Spanish. Also ripped from the pages of the Encyclopedia of Common Knowledge were the following answers:

Bile, secreted by the liver, is yellow
The country that Cuba developed close ties with in the 1960s was Europe
The planet that has a little bit of ice at its poles is Pluto
The branch of government that can issue money is the treasury
Deaf people can tell what people are saying by looking at their mouths and lip-syncing
A powerful liquor from Barbados, made with sugar cane, is called Black Liquor
Linguistics is the study of bones
Convection transfers heat through solids and liquids
Martin Luther was associated with the civil rights movement
An English king decreed that one-third the length of his arm was a hectometer
The Painted Desert is in Nevada
The Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, and Betsy Ross House are in Washington, D.C.

That's all I can remember. But rest assured, there were a hundred more that I can't think of right now. I am wondering if the poor, poor Pitifuls even had team tryouts and practices. I'm thinking that maybe they just rounded up kids waiting for the bus and threw them on and drove them here against their will. They WERE about 10 minutes late. Maybe some of them put up a fight, like Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes, when the apes threw the net over him.

There's another academic team meet on Thursday. I don't plan to go. It's away. While I might be obsessive, I'm not going to be one of those parents that follow my son around like a groupie with a video camera to catch his every breath. I will go to the home meets. That's enough. And the weather is supposed to get bad Thursday anyway. It might be canceled.

We have visions of a snow day dancing in our heads. Our heads that are full to overflowing with common knowledge.