Academic Team Update - 4/15/10

Today was our final competition for Academic Team. I must say, I was very sad about this because I loved this activity from the beginning. It gave me a chance to put to use my abnormal love for geography and not be ridiculed for my extensive knowledge. I'm glad that I have persevered with this commitment and been moderately successful.

The competition today, the second Knowledge Master Open, was a great success. I wasn't able to attend our first one because I had a conflict with my Spanish class, so coming into the competition today I had no idea what to expect. Of course, we have been practicing extensively and doing approximately 50 questions each Tuesday at lunch, but sitting in a room for two hours and answering question after question is an entirely different experience. Either way, I was as prepared as possible, and I think that I did really well. During the competition we all worked together very well and seemed to finally be the cohesive unit we had sought for so long. We were cautious in being sure of the answer before we declared, and collaborated extensively on math questions and the like. Our team scored around 1225 points, a very respectable result.

I was very proud of my personal performance. The questions were of great variation and I was able to correctly answer many of them, demonstrating my fairly comprehensive knowledge. Of course, I still need some work on literature (no time to read books!) and the sciences. However, the compendium below shows the extent of my contribution:

• The location of the Malacca straits
• The location of the region Thrace
• The location of the Negev desert
• That Mogadishu is located on the Indian Ocean
• That Algeria doesn't speak Portuguese
• What Timbuktu is
• Who Dante Aligheri was
• Some inventions of the French (not the telegraph or fireworks)
• What Gondwanaland is
• That the region Amazonia is not in Argentina
• That in Latin, ripa = river banks
• And even some math problems, like that x=12 in the proportion -3/x x/-48

I am really proud of all of our hard work and contribution and I hope that I will be able to resume this activity next year!