Our Knowledge Bowlers

We have a new activity this season in Krinkeland: Knowledge Bowl. Both Amanda and Elisabeth decided this year to give it a try; Amanda competes on a 7th-8th grade team for her school, and Libby on one of the 5th-6th grade teams.  I had friends who participated in Knowledge Bowl in junior high and high school, but I never did.  I'm sure I thought I was too cool at the time... or, maybe, I was just too busy doing other things, because I was never really cool, and I chose to do a lot of other un-cool things.  For the record, I am a big fan of NOT COOL and am trying hard to nurture my children in all aspects of non-coolness. 

 

Anyway, the girls came home from their first meet last week all jazzed up and saying Knowledge Bowl was the greatest thing they had ever done!  Well, I simply could not imagine this, because my children do lead very, very fun lives.  I'm sure it helped with morale when Amanda's team tied for first place at the meet, and Elisabeth's team also finished quite well. 

 

This week, Grandma volunteered to take the younger kids to their piano lessons so I could travel to another town to watch the girls compete.  I couldn't really grasp how Knowledge Bowl (a quiz-show-type competition) was really a spectator sport... but a friend of mine who has three avid Knowledge Bowlers in her family assured me it was the best thing she ever gets to watch!  I sat next to her in the first round we attended, and, thank goodness, she gave me the lay of the land.  She explained rules and procedures and established that she would be keeping her own tally sheet, just in case she needed to cross-check with the judges.

 

Then, she handed me a piece of paper and a pencil.  "This is for you to write down the correct answers," she explained. I said, "But, I'm not competing-- I don't need to know the answers."  She went on, "But you WILL know the answers, and you're going to get frustrated when the kids don't... and then you will start sighing and be tempted to groan or even shout out the correct answers.  So, just avoid all that and write them down."

 

She was pretty right... and is, for this any many other reasons, a valuable friend to have.

 

Grandpa and I traded off watching one girl's team one round, and the other the next.  This time, their teams did not fare quite as well as the last, but they still had just as much fun.  The kids got a lot of questions wrong, but they got a lot right, too, and, as one mom pointed out, "Hey, they're all jazzed up to just take academic tests, for fun!"