The Psych Bowl is basically Scholastic Bowl for AP Psych students. We’re even borrowing Borgy’s buzzer system. I miss a whole day of school, including one Physics test, so I can be driven down to College of Dupage in an ice cream van with Mrs. A and an 85% female team.
We only had two quickie practices so most of the team was relatively green. I was voted (against my wishes) to captain the first shift, five of the ten contestants, because of my aggressive performance at another informal practice.
The tenets of strategy I was working off of, I learned from Schol Bowl.
1. Stay physically aroused. The pounding heart and stress-induced adrenaline make me more impulsive. I am more likely to ring in with the first bullcrap response that may or may not be right.
2. The brain prefers glucose to fat reserves. A sugar binge immediately before a match floods my bloodstream with C2H3O2 and focuses my thoughts. For a while. Until the hydrocarbon concentration is depleted. Then, I’m a dead buzzer.
The first round was a marker, a whiteboard and a judge. The ten of us each had fifteen seconds to write the answer to the spoken question for five points. I missed 2 out of 3 on the whiteboard round. This has a bonus of me never forgetting the terms: “mental set” and “latent learning”. Still we came out on top with 80 points, tying with Stevenson. The buzzer round was a sweep. We dominated the first round against Niles West (265/100?)
But after the break, we faced Homewood-Flossmoor (I think that was their name.) and were blindsided by them for nearly all of the first round’s questions. The explanation, as we later found out, was that the questions were from a different textbook, which explains our performance in the first round what with the questions using vocab from our book. Thus the first shift of players lost hope (learned helplessness). But the second shift came back, saved by Nicole’s knowledge of the sexual response cycle (and the other team’s relative prudishness) and Alicia’s Stress and Health knowledge.
After pigging out on veggie pizza (in the same room we have math team regionals awards in) we were told that we were in second place 445 to Stevenson’s 650. We were to have one last showdown in that very room. I again captained the first shift and commanded them to “be reckless”. With Stevenson, we had no other strategy.
We were a little lost for the first four questions. And then I became too reckless, and dumb. Screwing up a baby sleep question. I was in a glucose trough due to the fatty pizza sans soda and my lack of review became apparent.
The next shift in picked it up proving that aggression does not a good player make bad grammar mistakes. The final score was …bad. But not a massacre. Certainly something better than our first round.
We rode home singing “We are the Champions” with Michelle waving our second-place trophy around her head and all of us singing our hearts out. Then we got Slushies when Mrs. A stopped for gas and that was the best psych bowl ever. We may have gotten schooled by Stevenson, but at least Nicole, Brad and I weren’t schooled by physics.