By Maya Viswanathan
On Wednesday, April 24, Jefferson’s scholastic bowl team went to regionals. Scholastic Bowl is a competition where five kids work together to answer trivia questions. They can discuss the answers to some, but not to all questions. The questions can be about anything. Math, history, science, popular culture, art, and grammar are some topics. The season has been going on since winter. We have matches almost every week. If we won our two matches at regionals we would advance to the next round at regionals and if we continued winning, we would eventually go to state. Unfortunately, this year, we lost both our matches at regionals.
My favorite part of Scholastic Bowl is the matches. They are really fun, even when we lose, but especially when we win. They are always thrilling and exciting. It is especially fun, when you get to answer a question. For example, I listen to classical music a lot and I play the violin and piano so I can sometimes answer the music questions. It makes you feel good that you knew the answer. There are so many different topics in Scholastic Bowl and so many different kinds of questions that almost everyone gets to have the fun of answering something at least once.
Practice is also really fun. Every week, there is scholastic bowl practice on Tuesday and Thursday. We do a lot of different things at practice. Sometimes, we work on a specific topic that we aren’t very good at, like grammar, or geography. Sometimes we just answer random questions, and sometimes we have a mock match. Coach Anderson and Coach Siwecki make practice really fun for us. We learn a lot and we also get to talk to friends while we are practicing.
We learn a lot in Scholastic Bowl. One time this year, there was a question about the authors of award-winning books. There were four books. I read all four of them, but I didn’t remember any of the authors. When I heard the answer, I remembered that the author of Johnny Tremain was Esther Forbes and I also remembered the other three. I also learned the answers to a question about flying squirrels. The question asked about the scientific classification of flying squirrels. I learned that the phylum of the flying squirrel is chordata and the order of it is rodentia. Another thing I learned was a question about font. Did you know that Steve Jobs came up with the idea in a calligraphy class? I also learned many other things in Scholastic Bowl, but I won’t mention them now. If you want to find out, you should go to Scholastic Bowl next year.
This year Scholastic Bowl was great. Even though we lost both games at regionals, our team improved a lot over the season. Hopefully, the team will do even better next year. In conclusion, if you want to learn new things, spend time with friends, and have a lot of fun, you should join scholastic bowl next year.