Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [63]
But the organizers do what they can to soothe crushed dreams and bruised egos. Contestants eliminated in the finals get to decompress in a backstage greenroom with milk and cookies and staff members telling them how great they were. Children may feel life’s setbacks more keenly than adults, but they also bounce back quicker. “It happens every year,” laughs Mary Lee. “I have to send somebody back there because they start having a party and they get a little loud, and you start hearing them from outside.”
Parents aren’t allowed in the cookie room, and that’s not an accident. At the start of every bee, Mary Lee sends the students ahead into a reception and asks their parents to stay behind for a moment. “I give them a little talk, saying that they’re there to support their children. This is their children’s contest, not theirs.” The yearly lecture is a result of past run-ins with the atlas-cramming equivalent of high-pressure Little League dads. “I once had a father go up to a young boy after the preliminary rounds and start yelling at him: how could he get this wrong, and why didn’t he make the finals? It just tore my heart. I went up and took the boy away from his father and said, ‘Let’s go over here.’ They lose perspective, that their child is just doing the best they can. Just give them a hug and tell them they’re wonderful.”
That afternoon I hop aboard one of a flotilla of buses parked in front of the hotel. The bee weekend isn’t all questions and answers: the day before the prelims, the contestants and their parents get a tour of Washington, and the night before the finals, there’s always a picnic. Most of the kids can relax, with the bee finally behind them; for the ten finalists, it’s a chance to blow off a little steam before tomorrow’s baptism by fire: more of the same brain-straining questions, only now with the added stress of TV cameras and Alex Trebek.
Vansh Jain of Wisconsin and Shiva Kangeyan of Florida, sitting behind me, are among tomorrow’s batch of finalists, and they’re talking shop. “Is the lowest point in Africa in Djibouti?” Vansh asks. “Yes!” comes a unanimous chorus of replies. The conversation moves on to the tides in the Bay of Fundy.
They all seem lively and relaxed, whether they’re finalists like Vansh and Shiva or nearly-made-its like their friend across the aisle, South Dakota’s Alex Kimn. They’re not sitting with their parents anymore, and the contrast to the high-strung little huddles in the hotel lobby this morning is remarkable. This is band-of-brothers camaraderie, this is furlough from the parental grind.
“So were you guys nervous today?” I turn around to ask.
There is general scorn. “I think being nervous is funny,” says Alex.
“What about your parents? Are they more nervous than you?”
“Oh, yes.” “Yes yes yes!” “Definitely.”
I’m sitting next to Doug Oetter, the geography professor who helps run the Georgia state bee. Seeing students excel at geography is a pleasant switch for him. “My college students are geeked out to the max,” he says—proficient, thanks to AP exams, in genetics, cell structure, amino acids, electron shells. “But you ask them about basic geography or earth science—cumulus clouds or biomes—and they’re clueless. I literally have to start with longitude and latitude. They don’t know what causes the changing of the seasons, or the tides.” Just like ancient civilizations creating legends about pomegranates and things to explain natural phenomena, I think. Except that these kids probably don’t care that they don’t know.
Academic geographers actually criticized the idea of the bee when National Geographic first announced it, sure that it would hurt the prestige of geography to reduce it to the status of mere facts, spelling-bee fodder. “Rote memorization must be emphasized as the level of competitive difficulty increases,” predicted Marc Eichen of Queens