I am a person who doesn’t really put my attention on things that aren’t my main focus. I prefer to put my focus on the major things than do a bunch of small things that I don’t really care about.
However, there is one small thing that I really like and care about. Knowledge bowl is one of those things that I’ve always felt that I should be in but didn’t join until this year.
When it was time to sign up this year, a lot of other people I knew were doing it too, so I figured I’d give it a try. Answering random questions couldn’t be that bad, after all.
Knowledge bowl is basically a bunch of schools coming together to see how many random questions they can answer correctly. However, it’s not like 20 kids from our school are going against a school with 10 kids.
The schools are divided into teams of four or five; if there are five, the teammates alternate sitting out. We have around three teams go against each other in each room, and based on how many questions they get right, the teams ranking can go up or down and they can go to a different room based on that result.
ADVERTISEMENT
In knowledge bowl, there are four total rounds, with about 45 questions each round. The questions can be about subjects we have learned in class or just random knowledge. They are on a variety of things, so we have some people that are stronger in other areas than others. That’s why we work together as a team.
With me, I’m pretty good with questions about geography and other countries. The other questions, I’m just OK at. I’ve been put on pretty good teams so far, and we work together very well. There’s something about getting on a roll and getting question after question right.
During the last round in our last meet, that happened. They started asking a lot of questions that we knew, many of them questions about different places. We were in the same room as another team for our school, and one of the people on that team was disappointed because they started asking questions about different places that he knew the answer to but I had drilled in my head. Yes, we do have kind of a rivalry going on.
I think we have a pretty good knowledge bowl program going on at our school. You would picture a bunch of unkempt nerds being the only ones in knowledge bowl, but that is as far from what we are with our team.
We have a decent number of people in knowledge bowl at our school, and our teams place typically in the upper middle.
Knowledge bowl meets are nice because not only will people not be totally weirded out if you know the capitol of Guyana (yes, I do, but it’s only because it’s the name of a college I want to go to), but because you really connect as a school.
If you’re interested in joining knowledge bowl, you should give it a shot because it requires very little time commitment and is pretty fun. We only have morning practices twice a week, and occasionally have a meet. Sure, make up work from missing a day isn’t fun, but it’s worth it.
All in all, knowledge bowl is one of my favorite activities.
ADVERTISEMENT
Holly McCamant is a sophomore at Frazee-Vergas High School.
