Last Saturday was Mer’s day, and we started it out by heading north to Lyndhurst to Hawken Middle School. A few months ago, Mer agreed to be the coach for the brand-new junior high Academic Challenge team. Academic Challenge is competitive trivia, basically, and CVCA has had a high school Academic Challenge team for years now, but the junior high team was new with Mer’s team. She has twelve seventh graders, and on this particular Saturday we were headed to the very first meet for the new team. Mer ended up having four girls and four guys come to the meet (the other four had schedule conflicts), and so she made a girls’ team and a guys’ team (a team is made up of four students, although because each round has three sections, you can have additional students substitute in).

Hawken Middle School is jaw-droppingly beautiful. The school is only three years old, and Hawken costs almost $25,000/year to attend, so the tuition buys you small classes and a stunning school. Each of the grades (six, seven, and eight) had its own wing, called a “pod.” Our meet was taking place in the seventh and eighth grade classrooms.

Hawken has a well-established team, so it was fielding four teams – two JV teams and two varsity teams. Since some junior high schools include ninth grade as well, it is permissible to have ninth graders on junior high teams. I’m pretty sure that all the members of Hawken’s varsity teams were eighth and ninth graders. They knew their stuff. The public high school from Kent also sent two teams, so there were eight teams in all. Each team went head to head against another team in a round, and so there were four matches going on during each round. Each question in a round was worth so many points, and at the end of all the matches, each team just tallied its own points, and the team with the most points won.

I was drafted to help, since they needed help running the meet. Mer and I teamed up:  she read the questions and I kept score. It was interesting. I knew the vast majority of the answers to the questions, but by no means all of them. The kids did very well, especially the Hawken varsity teams. The very last match of the day pitted our two CVCA teams against each other, and they were even in our room. It was a fun way to end the meet.

Since this was our very first meet for our team, we did not know what to expect. They did well – both teams were competitive, and our boys’ team finished third out of the eight teams, losing to the two Hawken varsity teams.

After the meet, we went home, where I napped while Mer ran and got groceries. In the evening, we went to a Teacher Appreciation Dinner thrown by the parents of one of Mer’s students. Every year, this family invites all the teachers that are teaching their sons to their house for dinner. It is a very thoughtful thank-you. We had gone last year as well, and the food is all homemade (including the pasta), and is very good. This year, the only teachers who could make it were us and the Churchills, which was a nice surprise for us, since they are such good friends. We had a wonderful dinner, and the family gave us gifts of rare coins (they collect coins) – they gave us coins from Hitler’s Nazi Germany. The older of the two sons, Steven, is in Royal Fools, so I know him pretty well, so it was a pleasant evening at the dinner table.

After dinner (and dessert – cannoli!), we all moved into the living room, where we all played each other in Wii sword fighting. It was a really funny thing to see, and Zach Churchill turned out to be the man to beat in the reaction-time sword game (a game where you need to slice fruit and other objects in a random direction faster than your opponent). I’m afraid I began to feel a bit poor for the last half hour or so, so I’m not sure I was the best company at the end of the evening. Overall, though, we spent about three hours there, and it was a good time.