Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 18, 1990 TAG: 9003162518
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: Jack Chamberlain
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Well, let me count the places.
For the second consecutive year, I had been invited to be a judge in the Odyssey of the Mind Roanoke Regional Competition. Without an honest excuse to decline again this year, I did my civic duty.
I'm glad I did. It was fun. I learned a lot. I'll be glad to keep doing it until I get it right.
I reported to the judges' staging area in the gym basement on March
Someone told me to grab an official Odyssey of the Mind T-shirt from one of the two cardboard boxes on the floor by the door. The choices were large and extra-large. They were white with the OM logo in red and, across the top in big red letters, it said "OFFICIAL."
What a power trip. All day long, parents, teachers and nervous little kids, all trying to impress a judge, treated me with the respect my own adult children are just beginning to realize. They said "sir," even when I wasn't their judge.
My partner was Susan Kidd, a supervisor with the Botetourt County schools. She was veteran of last year. I was a nervous novice wondering what to do. And Susan wasn't there yet.
What if she doesn't show up? I thought. I don't have the slightest idea what to do. They had a training session for judges in February, but I didn't know that until March.
Susan, looking official in her official T-shirt, showed up at the last minute. She had been setting up the game we would judge in Room 219.
We judged a spontaneous competition for kids in grades 6-8. Some of the OM competition is long-range - devised, planned and rehearsed for months. But teams come into the spontaneous competition cold - and without coaches and parents. They had a few minutes to discuss the problem and work out a solution, then go to it.
Our game was something like the old "Beat the Clock" TV game show. That will give you an idea of how old I am. It was a black and white TV game show.
The kids had four minutes to move 25 Styrofoam cups from one set of 25 grids, numbered 1 to 6, to the correct places on two other sets of numbered grids.
But first, they had to divide themselves into two teams. One team would know where the cups should go. The other team had to move the cups.
The catch: The team in the know had to tell the kids moving the cups where they should go without talking to them.
Another catch: Some of the cups were distinctive because they had something in them - a paperclip, a pingpong ball, a marble, a rubberband, hard candy, whatever.
How does one team of competitive and anxious youngsters describe a yellow pingpong ball and where it should go to another team of competitive and anxious youngsters without screaming and shouting?
Ah, ha. That was their problem!
Oh, the anxiety. The contortions. The stifled words. The muffled shrieks! And the kids were almost as bad!
Just kidding. Susan and I were models of fairness, almost robot-like in our friendly, but stoic, efforts to treat all teams alike.
But we often anguished over the kids who needed just a little hint we couldn't give. Remember how you just couldn't resist helping your own kindergartner with his shoelaces? But those were the days before Velcro.
Sixteen five-member teams, including four from the New River Valley, passed through Room 219 in 15-minute intervals like widgets on an assembly line.
The rules gave the kids five minutes to discuss the problem and four minutes to score points without talking. That left the judges six minutes for relaxing small talk with each team of nervous pubescents, reading the rules, answering questions and setting up for the next team.
The idea, of course, was to be fair and impartial. So Susan and I felt awful when we realized, after three or four teams had passed, that we had neglected to read the last part of the instruction on how to score points.
We couldn't correct our omission and give other teams a possible advantage, so we continued not reading how to score points. But each team had a copy they could read themselves. Alas, none of them did.
All the kids knew was they had to get right cups in the right places to score the most points. They tried hard. Some teams got their acts together quickly with simple "codes." One scored 40 points, another scored 33. Other teams stumbled and fumbled with complicated "codes," that seemed to confuse everybody, barely communicating. One scored 4, another 7.
We wondered what would have happened if the kids had realized they would get a point for every cup moved to the other two grids, without penalty for cups in wrong places. Would it have dawned on any of them to move all 25 cups right away, scoring at least 25 points, then figure out the right placements for maximum scores?
Who knows. One thing was for sure. The teams had the instructions to read. None of them bothered, preferring to be told everything.
Ah, this MTV generation. I'm sure a lot of them can read. They just don't.
by CNB