Kids

Today, I had a fun day acting as an interview judge as part of the 2014 Regional Academic Decathlon.  This is an academic competition for high school students in Wisconsin.

According to the CESA Website:

WIAD challenges students to push themselves beyond what they thought academically possible, motivating and recapturing their interest in academics.  The program rewards the heroes of the academic arena.  

It encourages "C" students to excel beyond their current achievement level and teaches other students they have strengths they can contribute to the team. 

Regional Competition will be held simultaneously at five host sites on January 10, 2014.

Twenty teams will progress to the State Competition in Wisconsin Dells on March 13-14.

The state winner and runner-up will represent Wisconsin at the National Finals April 24-26, 2014 in Honolulu, Hawaii.

I was so impressed by the high school students I had the honor of interviewing today.  I am pretty sure at least a couple of those kids are going to make a real difference in the world.   We had 7 minutes with each young person, and we asked them as many questions as they could answer in that time frame.  

The questions were diverse, here are just a few examples. 

If you didn't live in Wisconsin, where would you want to live?

More than one of the kids said London.

What do you think make for a good friend?

The answers were pretty interesting here, but honesty came up more than once, and standing by you through think and thin, including when one friend is a Justin Bieber fan and the other is not.

What do you read everyday, and why?

Some of these kids are reading classics and mentioned authors that I have only heard of, and true to the teenage popular theme, many read fantasy.

What one person has influenced your life and why?

A couple of kids mentioned a teacher that had taken time to steer them in a new direction or supported their interests or helped them in some way.

One girl talked about her Mom, and said that she knows that most people think kids raised by a single Mom aren't going to turn out well, but that she thought she was going to prove that wrong.

(This made me glad yet sad, do kids really think that being raised by a single Mom means you don't have a shot?  We have to change how we think, we just have to.)

What three things do you want us to know about you?

This was a fun question, the kids lit up talking about their love for music, their passion for art, their pride in bringing up grades, one of the girls talked about hunting with her Dad, one young lady told us about her father dying when she was in grade school and how she is strong now because of living through that.

There really are a lot of good kids in the world, but some of the bad ones hog all the news.

I wish I would have stayed for the awards, next year I will plan to be there.

I'm hoping for an invite to judge at the state level, I probably won't be going to the National Competition.

What a fun day!

LIG