While JHS WIN times are usually reserved for students making up school work, Olivia Havig ‘28 and Molly Schaffer ‘28 use it to get ahead through Knowledge Bowl, an academic competition where they are quizzed on topics ranging from geography to pop culture.
In this competition, a group of 5 high schoolers work together to answer 200 multiple-choice trivia style questions in order to be one of the top two teams who qualify for the next level. After ELP teacher Ms. Smith recommended it to Havig this year, she formed a group with a few of her friends.
“So all 5 of you are around one iPad and you’re all taking the test together. You don’t have to do it by yourself, which is nice,” Havig and Schaffer said. “…We also didn’t really know what we were getting into. We just were kind of like, ‘let’s do it. It’ll be fun.’ We did pretty bad, but it was still fun.”
While they didn’t advance to the next round, winning the competition wasn’t the main focus for the girls.
“…[in Knowledge Bowl] you get to do something you didn’t really get to do before. It’s not high pressure…I think you can make it how you want it to be. We decided this is going to be something we do for fun. We don’t really care about winning. We want to get a good score and we want to have fun and we are all friends… There are definitely teams that are being way more competitive with it, but you definitely don’t have to. I think we had more fun not making it competitive,” Havig and Schaffer said.
Through enjoying the competition with each other, the girls learned important skills along the way such as delegating questions and teamwork.
“Olivia was taking medical terminology at the time, so when a medical thing popped up, we were going to Olivia for the final [decision],” Schaffer said. “And Talia has good geography, and [Molly] is good at math and science, and then Reese knew the pop culture stuff,” Havig said.
For some students, academic competitions can seem intimidating and carry a high-pressure and high-intensity culture. Knowledge Bowl, however, is a welcoming club anyone can join.
“If you start your WIN time doing nothing anyway, [you] might as well do Knowledge Bowl… everyone is smart enough to do Knowledge Bowl because most of the questions nobody knows the answer to, so you can just do it for fun, like, maybe you’ll get it right, or some of the things aren’t even, like, school related. It’s the most random things,” Schaffer and Havig said.
One of the most challenging parts of Knowledge Bowl is not only answering questions correctly, but knowing how to deal and recover from the questions answered incorrectly.
“You have to get used to getting a lot of questions wrong. You have to accept it and get a lot of questions wrong, but then there’s going to be that question where you know the exact answer and then you’re going to get 10 points on it…If you were somebody who thinks you know everything, Knowledge Bowl will prove you wrong,” Havig and Schaffer said.
