Ten teenagers perch on the edge of their chairs, black buzzers in hand, heads angled toward the faint voice moderating the Scholastic Bowl.
“What is the angular velocity in degrees per second of the minute hand on a clock?”
Auburn High School senior Tyler Kerr glances toward the ceiling, calculations whirling in his brain. As other contestants frantically scribble on scraps of paper, Kerr presses the small buzzer in his hand.
“Point one degree per second,” he answers coolly and correctly. Ten points.
Moments later, Auburn senior Colleen Powers ticks off, in rapid-fire quickness, the main characters in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” (Charlie Bucket, Mike Teavee, Veruca Salt, Violet Beauregarde and Augustus Gloop.) Twenty points.
When a buzzer-eager Siva Sundaram rings in early during a question about an Oscar-winning composer, his teammates don’t mind that he answers “John Williams,” instead of “Henry Mancini.” Why should they? Auburn already was trouncing its competition.
By the end of the regional match, Auburn had clobbered its opponents 447 to 130, helping the Rockford school earn a trip to the annual state Scholastic Bowl championship in Peoria on Saturday.
It was an admirable, but not uncommon, performance by a team that appears poised to make a strong run at the Class AA state title.
With a state-best 103 wins and four losses this season, the Auburn team is built for success.
It has the right mix of personalities (easygoing, serious, calm and aggressive). It has one of the state’s top players (Kerr); specialists in key subjects (Powers in literature); and at least one young player willing to take risks (14-year-old Sundaram.)
But don’t expect any trash talking from the students. They are as modest as monks.
“I think if we work together and do our best, I hope we come out on top,” says Patrick Flanagan, a senior on the Auburn team. “But there are a lot of other good schools out there.”
To win state, Auburn must get past some gifted clubs, including three-time state champion Wheaton North High School and powerhouse Fremd High School from Palatine. If Auburn wins, it will mark the first time the school has won a team state academic championship.
“It would be a tremendous boost to the morale of the school and the district and the city,” said coach Linda Greene. “And it would mean so much to these kids.”
Scholastic Bowl is like “Jeopardy” on steroids.
Unlike other popular high school academic competitions, such as the Science Olympiad or the Worldwide Youth in Science and Engineering challenge, which focus on specific subjects, the Scholastic Bowl forces students to master many topics.
Contestants face questions in calculus, astronomy, home economics, European history, classical music, agriculture and even driver’s ed.
In some cases, competitors must know recondite information (Give the more common name of Bach’s Six Concerti Grossi, BMV 1046-51, 1717-1721. Answer: Brandenburg Concertos.) But most questions focus on material that well-studied honors students should know.
During a recent competition, students were quizzed on linear functions and the theory of relativity. And they had to know the differences between fascism and mercantilism, and between Hinduism and Buddhism.
Scholastic Bowl is reminiscent of “College Bowl,” the popular 1960s TV program. Teams of five students sit at facing tables. A moderator asks a “tossup” question and any student can ring in. If the student answers correctly, her–or more likely–his team (boys significantly outnumber girls) earns 10 points.
That team gets first crack at the “bonus question,” a multi- part question worth 20 points. Teams have 30 seconds to huddle and come up with the “bonus” answers. If they do not, the other team gets a shot. The top-scoring school wins.
Building a state champion Scholastic Bowl team is an art.
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First, you need a team of smart, hardworking and dedicated students.
Then, you need a leader who is brilliant, calm under pressure and worthy of teammates’ respect.
Auburn team captain Tyler Kerr is the Michael Jordan of Scholastic Bowl–a player who can win a match virtually on his own. During the regional meet in Rockford, Kerr buzzed in on 12 of 30 questions and got all but two correct. Last year, he was named to the All-State Scholastic Bowl team.
But Kerr, who plays second violin in the Rockford Youth Symphony Orchestra, has another important attribute: He is inexplicably calm during bonus questions. While teammates excitedly whisper in his ear and shove written answers his way, Kerr remains Zenlike. His speech is so controlled and his demeanor so composed, he often appears to be moving in slow-motion.
“He’s always been like that,” said his mom, Nancy Cleburn. “Sometimes I watch him at the tournaments and I’m getting more excited than he is.”
A superstar like Kerr can get a team only so far. To win a state title, you need subject savants, especially in literature, pop culture and sports.
Patrick Flanagan, who played football and baseball for Auburn, is a master of obscure sports and pop-culture trivia. What he doesn’t gather through osmosis, he finds in the study guides his coach provides.
“I can recite bands from the ’70s and ’80s and statistics from random baseball players,” he says. “It’s weird. A lot of sports and pop-culture stuff just sticks to me.”
But Flanagan favors another method of acquiring information: watching sports with his dad.
“That’s the best part of Scholastic Bowl for me,” he said. “It’s like a father-son thing, but it also helps me with Scholastic Bowl.”
When it comes to literature, Auburn turns to the bookish Powers, editor of the school newspaper. A voracious reader, Powers attended a quiz bowl camp for three summers and “majored” in literature.
Kerr defers to Powers on literary questions, and she is rarely wrong. But unlike most of her male counterparts, the shy Powers can be reluctant to press the buzzer.
“Ms. Greene keeps saying, `You need to be a tigress,’ and I know it’s true,” Powers says. “When I was a freshman I was afraid to buzz in, but hanging out with the boys has made me more aggressive.”
Then there’s Sundaram, a freshman. During competitions, he shifts in his chair, slaps his temple when he gets answers wrong and grins when he gets them right. Sometimes, he’s a little quick on the buzzer.
“It’s part of my personality; I’m a risk-taker,” said Sundaram, who was on the state championship West Middle School Scholastic Bowl team last year. “I think [why] people won’t buzz in is because they worry they will get it wrong and people will think they are stupid. … People who know me know I’m not stupid.”
Auburn also has sophomore John Brown, who is as strong in the humanities as he is in the sciences.
Alternate Michael Jiang, a freshman, is a generalist who can buzz in on a variety of questions.
Finally, the Auburn team has one other attribute that many teams lack: the five senior players (Kerr, Powers, Flanagan and alternates Ryan Salberg and Lindsay Pearson) have attended Rockford’s gifted program together since 1st grade.
“We are all friends and we have a lot of respect for each other,” Kerr says. “We want to do our best because we don’t want to let each other down. We don’t want to disappoint each other.”
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Scholastic Bowl sample questions
1) Science: “The concentration of a solution can be represented in several different ways. Which method of reporting concentration involves representing concentrations in terms of moles of solute per kilogram of solvent?
2) Literature: “This German author received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1946, in part, because of his use of mythology and the study of existence in his novels. His novel `Demian’ demonstrates this more than any other but it did not enjoy the success of his other novels, `Steppenwolf’ and `Siddhartha.'”
3) Social Studies: “Born in 1818, he had a big effect on 20th Century society. One branch of sociology, the `Conflict Theory,’ is based on his idea that conflict is responsible for producing social change. Who is this German who wrote `Poverty of Philosophy’ and the `Communist Manifesto.'”
4) Geology: “Aside from oxygen, name the six most common elements in the earth’s crust.”
5) Math: “What is the probability of a prime number less than 10 being drawn from a deck of cards?”
Answers:
1) Molality
2) Hermann Hesse
3) Karl Marx
4) Silica, aluminum, iron, calcium, sodium, potassium
5) 4/13
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Previous state champions
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Class AA:
2005: Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire
2004: Wheaton North High School
2003: Wheaton North
2002: Wheaton North
2001: Illinois Math and Science Academy in Aurora
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