When I was in high school, I played (poorly) on our school’s Academic Team. Academic Team basically consisted of answering questions about topics that one might learn about during the course of a college preparatory high school education, covering everything from literature and mathematics to history and sports. It was basically Jeopardy! for high schoolers.
I was—in all humility—a bit of a phenom in middle school, and was the high scorer for Aiken County, South Carolina my eighth grade year. Then I went to high school, and the difficulty of the questions and the intensity of the practices increased dramatically. Turns out there is a huge gap between what a kid is expected to know at the end of middle school versus the end of high school.
Still, my love for Academic Team never waned. When I started teaching, I immediately volunteered to coach my school’s High School Quiz Bowl team (South Carolina Independent School Association [SCISA] schools call it “Quiz Bowl,” rather than “Academic Team”). I’ve been doing so for ten years.
The Portly Politico 