While I have not just come from high school, I graduated recently enough (3 years ago) that I'm not yet a crusty old goat who doesn't remember what I did in high school; therefore, I've some comments to make on this topic. --- In quizbowl_at_yahoogroups.com, "Stephen Webb <sdwebb91984_at_y...>" <sdwebb91984_at_y...> wrote: > The problem with high school quiz bowl (well, one of them), is that, > because the tournaments are so large compared to college that it > turns into a massive exercise in capitalism. Teams go to tournaments > expecting to be able to answer most of the questions in a round, so > the canon is self-propagating. There are effectively two divisions in > the canon in high school: the stuff every team with half a clue > knows, and the stuff every team in the playoffs knows. I guess my experience is not typical of most high school quiz bowl situations, but I went to HS in San Diego, where we had a domestic league where teams were split into geographical divisions and played amongst themselves. The winners of the division then had playoffs for the city championship and then for the county championship. Tournaments were scarce (maybe one or two a year) and they were not very large, despite the fact that there were about 25 teams in the city league. The questions were not really split into the aforementioned categories, but were rather spread out in difficulty and subject matter. There were some questions that seemed pretty tough at the time and a number went unanswered in every match. > The interesting part is that, as compared to college (from what I can > tell from my limited experience), the canon is static in both cases. > If an Aztec deity comes up it will always be Quetzlcoatl, just as an > example. The only change is current events things like Nobel Prizes > and Pulitzers, and, on occassion, some daring writer will mention a > newly released hit book (as with the plague of Harry Potter questions > that hit the circuit my junior and senior year). And I will now > characterize everything in that canon: It's hard to tell if the canon is truly static. I know there was a good variety of questions within the subject categories themselves. There were definitely many different questions in the US History, European History, Science, Art, and other categories. In addition, we had quite a number of music questions including questions on opera and composers who might seem obscure at first glance to high school students. To me, they were obscure, but there were people on my team who knew it, so it wasn't inaccessible. > If it's science, it's very introductory chemistry or biology, and > with physics it's either a physicist or mechanics/emag. Modern > physics is rare unless the answer is involved with a Nobel Prize (ie, > photoelectric effect is accessible because of Einstein). It's hard to tell whether or not you're upset about this, but the reason that this is so is because that's all you learn in high school. Coming out of high school, unless you were an atypical player who was very advanced in math and physics, you would not normally know anything beyond mechanics, simple E&M, and maybe a little bit of optics. Asking high school students about modern physics is begging for disappointment. As for biology, I definitely remember a decent variety of questions in biology, though none overstepped the bounds of AP Bio as taught in high school. The same was true for chemistry. > If it's history it's European, US, or something to do with > colonialism. If it's about Japan it boils down to something involving > Feudal Japan, if it's China it's Taiping Rebellion, Boxer Rebellion, > dynasties or the first/last emperor. India is just as limited, and > forget about Africa, there's Mansa Musa, Shaka, their respective > empires, and the crusades. MAYBE something about Arab-Israeli wars. Again, I don't know what your personal experience with high school history is, but I took one year of AP European history and one year of AP US history in high school. European history in one form or another was expected of many students in the 10th grade while US was expected in the 11th grade. As seniors, many people in my high school did not take any history, and world history was taught to freshmen, so out of a total of three years of history, two years of that were devoted to either European or US history. The same was true for the whole district, more or less. I don't know the details of everyone's individual high schools but it would not surprise me if most people had about the same history program as I did. Therefore it should come as no surprise that the questions, based as they are on the high school curriculum, emphasize mostly US and European history. > If it's lit then it's European or US. Oe Kenzaburo is a stretch, and > Yukio Mishima is outright dead. Basho and Murasaki Shikibu come up > with some regularity, but anything else is such a stretch it's > ridiculous. Same argument as for history. Most of the high school curriculum focused on US, British, and European literature. Accordingly, the questions mirror this. > Mythology is Norse or Greco-Roman unless somebody's feeling real > adventurous and throws in something from India. Or Quetzalcoatl. No argument. > Similar issues exist with every other category. It's all Eurocentric > except for some stuff that somehow slipped past the powers that be. > Contemporary stuff is a stretch (Tanizaki, etc. = no go) while films, > no matter what their artistic merit, are regarded as trash by the > coaches. I remember hearing some stuff on contemporary authors and film, but not much. It's a shame, true enough. > I believe the problem lies with the curriculum in the high schools. > AP English my senior year everything we read was European. Granted, > it was supposed to be the Brit lit year, but even going to the years > that were supposed to be dedicated to "world" literature it was > mostly british and American literature. We didn't even venture into > French lit, and it was pretty much the happening thing in that whole > existentialism thing. "World" history suffered the same fate, > spending a grand total of maybe two weeks out of the year on ancient > asia, another week or so on the middle eastern early civilizations, > and then perhaps another two weeks, out of the entire year, on modern > non-european history. US history is 'nuff said. Science doesn't > bother to delve too deeply into the subjects giving a cursory > overview of things then moving the kids along. This is strange to me, because we spent a full year on world history, including the history of pre-Columbian civilizations, modern Mexico, Asia, and the Middle and Near East. In addition, I got a lot of history from my AP Art History class as a senior. We also read a bunch of French lit in my European Literature class during my sophomore year. As for the issue of science classes being inadequate, that is a whole other story. Suffice it to say that it is hard to teach high school kids any sort of advanced science. Most of them have neither the mathematical nor the conceptual sophistication required to absorb it. > I went to high school where the PTS(sic)A pretty much ran the show, > and while I know the president, he still had to bend on many issues. > There was a move to kick out Huck Finn because it's "racist" rather > than analyzing the actual literary merits of the novel. I lobbied to > read Lolita for four years, a novel with undeniable literary and > social merit, but we all know how that went. Works like "No Exit" are > too morbid for the bright cheery paint a rosy sky attitude that the > powers that be in curriculum writing have. I read "No Exit" in high school. I could've done without, personally. It's sad that there are a lot of books that should be getting read in high school and are not; a lot of problems come from political pressure and parental pressure to teach only "proper" literature. Has anyone ever read Vonnegut in high school? What about "Catch 22?" I doubt it, because those aren't considered "real" literature by the curriculum. It's a shame and we should all fight that. >And keep in mind that > yesterday's high school players are today's college players, the guys > writing the packets. And if they've been exposed for four years to > nothing but Eurocentric literature and history it's no wonder that > other areas of knowledge have managed to avoid the college bowl > canon. If we're going to gripe about the lack of diversity in the > questions we hear, let's hit the root of the problem, back in high > school, where Matsuo Basho and the Rape of Nanking are ignored by the > curriculums that the teachers basically must follow or else (our > school system had county standardized finals, which just escalated > the problem). I don't think it's inherently bad that high schoolers become exposed to mostly Eurocentric literature and history. We're a country with European roots, after all, and the political and philosophical foundations of this country have their origin in European thought. Therefore it makes sense that Eurocentric material is emphasized in high school; I think that's better than trying to focus on every part of the world and gaining only superficial knowledge from it because of the breadth of the material. Sorry about the length of this post. I just though there was a lot to respond to here. Jerry
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