Hastings High School was more into Academic Challenge (i.e. quiz bowl) and Math Team than Science Olympiad, but we competed in that too, halfheartedly, once or twice. I tried to identify rocks and minerals. Others took tests on psychology or did tangram puzzles. We built a suboptimal mousetrap-powered car that only went a few feet, and watched while elegant, spindly cars built on vinyl record wheels slowly and inexorably moved forward the requisite ten yards, then stopped in exactly the right spot.
It was disorienting to be in someone else's high school, surrounded by hundreds of techy kids and hanging out with some of the best math/science students/friends of HHS and yet feel totally alienated and embarrassed, cut off by anonymity and lassoed by nervous ineptitude into watching the proceedings as if a spectator.
Contrast with my euphoria on the six hour bus ride to Penn State, playing frisbee on the quads, running through the rain to see Johnny Mnemonic at the commercial strip at the bottom of campus, and reasoning through the various tests of the Atlantic Regional Mathmatics League national championships along with the Westchester team. It's not that the questions put to us were easier at ARML, or that I got many right, quite the opposite, but that was entirely expected. The way the entire system was phrased, as math so over our heads that any engagement was success, took the pressure off, and left me (us?) free to enjoy the weekend. Not that that led to actually meeting any of the thousands of mathletes from across half the country here either.
Yesterday's run destination: it's raining.
Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: eggs and english muffin and tea
lunch: potato soup
dinner: fish tacos!
assorted bonus holiday cooking over the past few days: blueberry tart, oatmeal currant cookies, sugared nuts, popovers, cream puffs
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