MORGANTOWN – OK, readers: Time for your brain to put pedal to mettle.
It’s test time.
It’s Academic Showdown time.
Academic Showdown is the Quiz Bowl-styled event where West Virginia students in grades 9-12 do brain-battle in regional competitions on their way to Charleston, where the finals are held under a big spotlight on a big stage.
Morgantown High School’s Showdown team did just that last week, besting Huntington High at the state Culture Center for top honors.
Which also meant that Lucille Dahl, Ethan Lui, Ava Jones, Zadie Behnke and Dashiell Harms also made Academic Showdown history.
They brought back the state title for the fourth year in a row for their school on Wilson Avenue, and Alex Godfrey – who teaches Advanced Placement psychology when he isn’t co-advising the team with his colleague and chemistry instructor Hunter Stape – already has devices on 2027.
“Five-peat,” he said, grinning. “Write that down.”
The Showdown, he said, runs intellectual circles around Trivia Night in the bar.
No memorizing by rote, he said.
The competition fosters critical thinking, builds self-confidence and those other lifelong learning benchmarks that boost him out the door every morning for his classroom.
Should you be wondering about the rigor, here are some actual Showdown questions for that little test we talked about earlier.
And no Googling. (You there, in the back: C’mon, no Googling, we said. Keep that phone where we can see it.)
The sampling:
No. 1: What term describes fatty acids with fewer than the maximum number of hydrogen atoms or solutions that have less than the maximum amount of solute?
No. 2: What man who started his career working for Dan Cody is murdered in his pool in West Egg and is the title character of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel?
No. 3: What harsh nickname was given by Southern detractors such as John C. Calhoun to an 1828 tariff signed into law by John Quincy Adams?
If you answered “unsaturated,” “Jay Gatsby” and “The Tariff of Abominations,” you might possibly have a chance to intellectually hang with Morgantown High School’s Academic Showdown team.
Well, maybe.
“I don’t know,” Godfrey mused. “These guys are good.”
That’s because the MHS team successfully answered all of the above-mentioned three in their contest against Huntington, and those were among the easier of the offering.
Lucille, who captained the team, said she loves the Showdown because she found a new passion, thanks to all the research that goes into it.
She’s going to college to pursue the field of astrophysics – which is the study of stars, galaxies and the like.
However, the Showdown competitions have also moved her from the stars of the Cosmos to the ones on the canvas. Van Gogh and “Starry Night.” And other works of the Masters.
“I’ve developed this interest in art that I probably wouldn’t have,” she said.
“That’s what’s great about the Academic Showdown,” said Dashiell, who is planning on a career in marine biology. “You start considering the whole world, and this is a pretty complex place.”
You don’t have to tell that to Ava, who will major in political science with an eye for law school.
She’s a Beltway ecosystem expert who turned into the team’s resident authority on Watergate, the scandal that forced the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
“I look at the news in a whole different way now,” she said.
Lucille is a junior who will (of course, she said) devote her senior year on the Showdown circuit.
Dashiell’s doing the same for his final year of school.
Ava, Zadie and Ethan are graduating.
This past Thursday in Stape’s chemistry lab, Lucille, Ava and Dashiell gathered to talk about their most recent championship.
If they made it look easy, Lucille said – well, what’s outward isn’t necessarily what’s inward, she confessed.
“There’s a lot of pressure and second-guessing,” she said.
But there’s also the fun and camaraderie, she said, and that whole high school ethos of finding something you’re uniquely good at, and then owning it.
This intrepid, intellectual trio said they wouldn’t change a thing about their MHS days – though Dashiell drolly said he was inspired to go into the sciences by specifically not taking any of Stape’s classes.
“Right there,” Stape said, raising his voice over the ensuing yuks. “This is what I have to put up with.”
Everyone got a charge out of Godfrey’s on-the-record prediction for next year – but Lucille was quite pragmatic about any undergrad trivia nights to follow after that.
“We’re horrible at pop culture references,” she said, laughing. “But we know everything else.”
