Spontaneous Questioning

A hasty introductory note as I head out the door: When Julie was here this week, we talked about how I wanted to be more disciplined about a writing project I've been meaning to start. It was one of the original purposes of my blog, but I've been avoiding it, I think. Anyway, here's the first installment, to be continued:

The first time we met, C. vowed to destroy me. That he nearly succeeded years later had little to do with his original vow, way back when we were in the sixth grade and competing in a program for gifted students called Olympics of the Mind. The geeky grandiosity of the name describes the program precisely, especially in its mid-1980s incarnation. In those years, at least in our small town in South Jersey, the population served by middle-school gifted educational programs was not known for its social grace or sense of style. What distinguished us then—what probably still does, though we’ve hopefully acquired better people-skills and less obtrusive wardrobes—was our utter seriousness of purpose. Contrive for us an awkward challenge (“Create a cave drawing during a six-minute skit featuring Cro-Magnon man!”) or demand a litany of bizarre and useless “creative” answers (“List uses for a paper clip!” “Name different kids of light!”) and we would hurtle ourselves after the task, like puppies eager to prove our love for bones.

It was that latter event, called Spontaneous Questioning, that got me into trouble. I don’t remember the question from that day, but I remember the way Spontaneous Questioning always ran. I remember feeling intensely alert, holding my breath almost, as my four teammates and I entered the empty classroom and faced the two judges whose authority we knew to be absolute--even if, as we discovered, their knowledge of the rules was occasionally suspect. In retrospect, I suppose those poor adults, culled from the ranks of the willing or just the naïve, found themselves poorly equipped to deal with a bunch of hyped-up pre-adolescents, back in those days before Ritalin had achieved its current popular distribution. And so as we pricked up our ears and leaned hard against our leashes, they’d read the question haltingly, and we’d pounce.

After hearing the question, our team would have a fixed amount of time to provide as many answers as we could. The first and maybe second times your own turn came around were easy, and then if you got stuck, your team's precious seconds ticked by until you plucked something out of thin air: paperclips could be earrings; lite yogurt might count, might even win a bonus point for creativity. After all the teams had competed, the team with the most answers won the event, and the individual student with the best answers got a special prize. When C. and I shared the award that year, I think he felt cheated out of half the glory he had come to expect for himself.