jeopardy

someone I knew was on jeopardy last week, a woman I went to high school with and am in FB contact with only.

Anyway, it reminded me of the time I tried out for Jeopardy and I thought I would share it.

It was 1994. I was 23 and recuperating from a bad illness. i couldn't do much but lie in bed or watch TV and I watched Jeopardy religiously. One night we saw that they were having tryouts in Atlantic City. My mother in law(or my boyfriend's mom at the time) loves AC. So we decided to take a trip down with her and I would try out.

I forget which casino the first test was in but we had to go through a maze of slot machines to a small conference room. Some guy explained that we would have, I think five minutes to take a ten question quiz. You had to get 7 of the ten right to move on. I sat down and got 6 almost right away. I didn't know the name of the "famous milanese opera house" (what is La Scala?) and I had another iffy answer, time was running out but at the last minute I looked at "rocky island" and for some reason 'bikini atoll' popped into my head. I almost shouted "Atoll! Atoll!" but wrote it down. They said to wait and listen if our name was announced and come back if it was in ten minutes or something like that.

We were playing slots when what do you know- they called my name. It was very exciting. They gave me a sheet of paper and told me to come back in a month for round two.

For round two my future mother in law drove me down. I was actually still pretty weak and couldn't handle a long drive. I crocheted the whole down, working on what became a queen sized blanket. I still think of it as my sick blanket. I just sat and watched tv and crocheted that blanket over me the whole winter.

At the start of Round Two there were about 80 people. We sat at long conference tables, 6 footers, two or three to a table. One woman came in late and seemed really fussy about where she would sit. This time there were 50 questions. They came up on a TV screen and we were told that they were all 800 or 1000 questions from previous shows. You would only have 30 seconds to answer before the next question came up. It didn't have to be in the form of a question. It was hard. Again, I remember the answers I knew I didn't know- a sphygnomanometer measures this( what is blood pressure?) and he composed Peer Gynt (who is Grieg?). I was sure I bombed.

They vanished for a bit and when they came back they said "If we say your name, congratulations, you passed." they start reading names, I'm getting ready to tell my mother in law i failed and not feeling too terribly disappointed when I hear my name. I was so surprised I said "Really?" Somebody laughed and the guy reading the names said "Yes, really." After they finished reading the list they said, "If we haven't said your name, I'm sorry but you won't be advancing. We don't share the scores of the tests so if your friends ask how you did you can tell them you just missed by a point." I'd say half to maybe two thirds of the people in the room didn't pass the test. Those of us who were left had to move to the front and fill in the empty seats.

I wound up sitting next to the woman who had come in late. We had a few minutes and she starts chatting with me about her doggie day care business and how she thinks this will get her on the show and she motions for me to come closer so she can show me some article she brought and I realize that she has been drinking. Now this thing started at 10 in the morning and she reeked. I'm looking around the room wondering "does anyone else know?" and also, "how the hell did she get through this test" I also noticed that I was the youngest person in the room by at least 15 years(I thought at the time, 15 years ago, HA). We had to introduce ourselves, say what we did, why we were hear. As the people were talking the list of occupations sounded like this "teacher, lawyer, lawyer, doctor, teacher, librarian, lawyer, teacher, teacher.." you get it. maybe with the occasional engineer. Then they get to me and I say "Hi, I'm a 23 year old waitress but not actually working right now. maybe I'll go back to college some day. I just thought it would be fun to see how well i could do." Oh, I forgot to mention that I had been on prednisone for about six months at this point so a lot of my hair had fallen out and my face was really puffy, so I can't even imagine what some people were thinking as I got up to give my spiel.

Then dog lady gets up and she was not exaclty incoherent but the guy asked her to repeat something she said and she started, I don't know how to explain it, speaking as loudly as someone could without shouting. and she was sort of waving her article around as she did it. I'm trying not to laugh, not because of what she was saying but because she was drunk and nobody knew it. and at the absurdity of the two of us among all the doctorlawyerteacher's there. I started thinking of us as the token fuck ups and because I was also nervous and excited I spent the rest of the introduction time trying not to laugh.

Now, it's time for the practice round and they explain that on real Jeopardy if you ring in before Alex finishes reading the question your buzzer is frozen for 10 seconds. The guy said some other stuff but I was still trying not to lose it. Especially when I realize that my new friend and I are going to be in the same group of three for mock jeopardy.

Let me tell you, playing for real instead of just on TV is really hard. Especially with two other people who you know are just as smart and probably smarter than you are. My group goes up to play and dog lady is clicking like crazy and arguing with the guy about not calling on her. I'm trying not to laugh. She answers a question "Texas" and he says "I'm sorry but..." and she says "It's texas. I know the answer is Texas. I was there last summer" and he says 'Remeber this is jeopardy.." she argues for another minute and finally he says 'it has to be in the form of a question." I knew I was out of it at this point and was fine with it. When the group before me came back from their turn, the lawyer had said "That was fun" but he didn't look like he meant it. I didn't think it was fun at all.

so, needless to say, I didn't make it on to Jeopardy which was fine. I know if I tried out again I could make it to the practice round again but the idea of being on TV and trying to keep my cool freaks me out. and I don't look good on camera. I think it was the knowing I was smart enough part that interested me, not the winning or TV part.

Busy Bee

How was your holiday everyone? The egghead has been up to all sorts of shenanigans in the past few weeks. School is on break. The kids go back on Jan. 5th but then we are leaving for Texas for two weeks on the 7th. I almost feel like January is over before it started.

I don't have much to say. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. and all that. I have made my new Year's Resolution. Last year's was to live a more inconvenient life. I think I was fairly successful in making some changes. I reduced my paper towel use to about 5% of what it once was. We began composting food. We doubled to tripled what we put in our recycling bin. I became more efficient in planning my daily trips to save gas. Overall I tried to be more thoughtful about how I do things. I'm going to give myself a solid B. Maybe a C+.

This year's resolution is to focus my meditation practice on the Buddhist principle of Right Speech. Right Speech means no lying, gossip or slander. It means not hurting people with your words. It also means your intent must be pure when you speak. I've read that Right Speech also means that your every word should be meaningful and help promote dharma so that even chitchat would be out but I'm not there yet.

There are a lot of reasons why I decided to focus on this. Some of it is that I find the news to be so relentlessly negative and depressing without any instruction to make the information they share useful. a man in california dressed up like Santa and killed 9 people. this is a tragedy to be sure but what benefit is it to those not living in his immediate vicinity to know about this. And the relentlessness of celebrity coverage has finally gotten to me. It adds nothing to the betterment of humanity. It's just a distraction. so I don't want to support that kind of speech anymore.

I will also work on my terrible habit of gossiping. I'm so bad. And again, do I really add anything to the people's lives that I gossip with. I would hate to know that people are talking about me. So why do i do it?

these are the changes I plan on making in the coming year.

I plan to be true to my values without trying to police the behavior of others. I want to be considerate of the effect of my words on my children, not just strangers.

I would like to stop using profanity. But I'm going to try and stop gossiping first.

Here's some follow up on things that I may or may not have followed up on:
Remember when i thought i was going deaf. Well it turns out I'm not. My hearing is borderline impaired. (Low enough to notice but good enough to not do anything about it). According to the audiologist my main problem is that I have four kids and live in a noisy environment.

That friend that I was mean to but then reunited with on facebook and I have a had a few very enjoyable lunches and may even go out to dinner with our fellas.Oh goodness it's 1 am and finn is up and that's why this post is so rambling. Well, I'll see you soon.

Facebook gripe again

A few students from Sudbury have friended me on facebook. They have recommended other friends to me but I choose to wait for students to friend me because I don't want to be weird mom trying to be in their little crew.

The problem is that now I have to monitor myself more closely because its like having kids around all the time. I've used profanity once or twice and today is my birthday and I posted a silly thing about having a drink to celebrate and now feel like it may not be appropriate since there are students from the school on my friends list. It's kind of annoying.

I also want to create a separate account to have my real friends on that list and then have an account for people that I want no more than sporadic contact with at best. Unfriending seems so dramatic.

Sorry I haven't been blogging much. I know the world is just a little bit paler, a little bit grayer without regular infusions of my wit and wisdom.

Fun Fact

Molotov Cocktails were not invented by Molotov or Russians for that matter. They were devised by the Finns during The Winter War and named for a Russian official who got the mess started in the first place.

Isn't that interesting?

My boyfriend's back

I had taken a break from Democracy in America. For starters, the library wouldn't let me renew Volume I again. So I got behind on my read along. Plus, fooling around on the internet takes up a lot of time that might be spent in nobler pursuits. Plus we were all sick.

Instead of trying to catch up I decided to just pick up where my group is and start reading again. We have moved on to Volume II. Here's an interesting tidbit-vol. I was better received in America than Europe but Vol. II (published about 7 years later) was more popular in Europe than America.

Volume II is more sociological in nature. It looks at the effect of equality on everyday life and relationships, not just politics. My guess as to why it was not as well received in America is that Chapter 3 probably rubbed people the wrong way. It's hilarious and feels like it was written after an exhausting party but I think that what he ascribes to American character is really the universal tendency of the boor to glom onto someone.

Vol I is written so admiringly of American political institutions but Vol II takes all sorts of little jabs at the american character. I think it's funny and still see a lot of truth to some of them but many of his comments must have stung. No time to share any of those. Facebook scrabble doesn't play itself you know.

more thoughts

I love analogies and metaphors and pretty much any way you can describe something as being like something else. Similes too. I love a good simile.

It was pointed out to me that my definition of curriculum was too narrow. I had already arrived at that conclusion but lacked the language to describe what a sudbury curriculum is. Here is a link that discusses the idea of curricula and learning experiences in a much more thorough, eloquent and better researched way than you will ever see on this site: The Moral Path of Curriculum: Fulfillment or Judgment

What I was really searching for was a way to crystallize the differences between a sudbury experience and one in a traditional school, especially the role of staff/teacher.

the first thought I had was "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink." the Sudbury experience focuses on the leading part. They provide the conditions for all sorts of amazing things to happen and it's up to the students to participate or not. Traditional schools focus on the drinking. They don't have to lead the horses anywhere because of our compulsory education laws so they are free to get a big funnel and pour all sorts of stuff down their horse's throat.

I thought of the water as being the great big world and all the interesting stuff that is out there to see. Then I thought about rivers and how knowledge and experience are not static, they aren't this big puddle to drink from, one thing flows to another, so I was thinking how Sudbury schools are like this big whitewater rafting trip. The staff is on the boat and they know more about sailing the boat than the kids do but they can't control the direction or speed or forsee every rock any more than the kids can so they're sort of all in it together. The SS Sudbury. Ha!

I think it takes a special sort of person willing to cede that much control.

The staff is also really busy. They just have a ton of stuff to do so even if you had someone who had an agenda it would be hard to implement it because there isn't a lot of time.

I should not be up at 1 am blogging. This is ridiculous.

Rambling again

As a new sudbury parent you think you know what The Philosophy is all about and sure you have your reservations but you think you can handle it. Then, one day, you come to a realization about the staff.

They are not teachers. They are not there to teach your kids. They are not even going to try.

If your kids asks them a question, they'll answer it to the best of their ability. If your kid wants help, they'll help. But they really truly have no interest in teaching your kid anything.

Sudbury schools are not curriculum based. They have no great wisdom to impart. They do not make learning "fun". And most importantly this is not even their organizing principle.

When you get this, as a parent, it's a little scary. You might feel cheated, hoodwinked. Hey, you think, what the hell kind of school is this anyway?

It's exactly the kind of school that they said it was. The organizing principle of a sudbury school is to prepare children to be active engaged citizens in a democracy. To be responsibile adults. I think they throw in the life long learner crap because people can't handle the idea of a school that doesn't have the word "learn" in its manifesto somewhere. No, it's just that people have a very rigid idea of what learning means and "life long learner" fits that better.

The learning that happens at a Sudbury School is like a slow cooker. It's like aging a fine wine. Or letting a cheese ripen. You create the optimum conditions to get the desired product and then you just let it go. Check on it from time to time and wait for the magic to happen.

It isn't that simple, there is a lot of tinkering but the point is that it is a subtle and long process and you wonder if it is ever going to work and then one day it does.

Curriculum based education is like a vintner who keeps tasting his wine too early and every time he doesn't like the taste he adds something else. And keeps adding and adding and sometimes at the end he gets wine and sometimes vinegar and sometimes grape juice. And when you criticize him he says "my equipment sucks" or "I didn't have enough money to do it the way I wanted to" but he never questions his method in the first place.

This is an imperfect analogy but I'm sure you see what I'm getting at. Traditional schools suck and sudbury schools rock. Case closed!!