>>Perhaps this is an indictment of the general high school curriculum.<< As a high school teacher and quiz bowl coach, I wish I could disagree with you. Unfortunately, too often teachers want students to do nothing more than regurgitate the information they've been taught in class. I want my kids to be able to identify and analyze the social and religious implications of "Self-Reliance," but most teachers just want them to memorize little phrases like "hobgoblin of little minds" and know that Emerson wrote it. I've found, however, that my best quiz bowl players are rarely the best students. Instead, they're kids who can make interdisciplinary and cross-curricular connections. They also tend to read voraciously and expose themselves to topics not found in the general curriculum. They take great pride in knowing some factoid that bewilders the straight-A kids and in having knowledge that's a bit more in-depth. It's true that most of the studying we do at this level (at least in our area) revolves around lists and whatever it is that makes up our local qb canon. But still, the beauty of qb is that it gives kids the opportunity to do more than spit back information that they crammed for the night before and lost an hour after the test. In Arkansas, the state quiz bowl association hired former high school all-star players to write the practice games and tournament questions for this school year. I previewed the questions today, and they're the best I've ever read because these kids know what kinds of questions they would want asked if they were still competing. It takes the high school system a little longer to catch on to things to college bowl participants have seemed to know for years, but we're getting there. God bless us, we're getting there.
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