Matthew B and the History Bee

Matthew-man had a chance to step up and show off his knowledge of all things historical at The Frederick County History Bee. Three students from each grade—3^rd, 4^th & 5^th—were selected to represent Valley, along with an alternate for each grade level. After weeks of early morning team practices, it was time to put his intellect where his mouth is!

Mom & Matt set out on Friday, March 19^th with the intent of arriving early enough to settle in and collect ourselves before the competition began. As with many Zoo Crew best laid plans, well, that just didn’t happen! Now, Mommy *knew* that the event was sponsored by the local community college and Mommy *knew* that the directions provided by Matthew’s school didn’t take us to the college, but who is she to argue with the teacher? (learned THAT lesson during her own school career!) Sponsorship doesn’t always = locationship, right? So we parked and dashed into the Parks & Recreation Office in downtown Frederick, only to find that they’d never even heard of the History Bee. (They have now, though!) YIKES!

Fast, frantic and fabulous driving across town--crazy mad dash across the college campus--Matthew made it to the registration table with a mere moment to spare. (Literally—we arrived at 11:39 am and registration closed at 11:40 am!) WHEW! (Do you know how rotten I would have felt if we’d been too late for him to participate? As it was, I felt HORRIBLE for being so rushed!) We parked our hineys with the rest of a very relieved Valley team and started a quick review quiz. Imagine my surprise to see that every other team member had a nice little folder with study materials and notes. Apparently, Matthew has kept his at school and has studied at recess and such. This Mom never saw any of those papers! At that moment, I will admit to feeling a wee bit nervous for the kiddo, since he was taking a somewhat lackadaisical approach to this big event.

Students were called to the floor for Round One. Each table had at least one Proctor, who asked each student, in turn, a wide variety of American History questions. When all students had responded to 10 questions each, scores were tallied and the two with the highest scores moved on to Round Two. Matthew responded correctly to 8 of 10 in the first round and moved on!! Two other Valley students also qualified for Round Two—more than in the last three years!!

Round Two: same game, tougher questions! Matthew managed to answer 6 correctly, but was bested by another student with 7 correct answers. Since only one child moved on from each table, well, Matthew was done for the day. He was a little saddened (more than I thought he would be!) at this turn of events, but we stayed to watch the Final Round.

Finals took place in front of the whole crowd. Questions were randomly selected from a large cage (think bingo or lottery) as each Finalist stepped forward to the microphone. Talk about nerve wracking! Questions in the Final Round were details from the history of Frederick County…really tough stuff!

An example: “On his way back to Washington from Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln took a detour into Frederick to visit with a wounded soldier. What was the name and rank of that soldier?” (If you don’t know, don’t feel bad…that one eliminated the student to whom it was asked!)

Matthew admitted that he probably wouldn’t have made it beyond the first round of Finalist questions…but says that he is now better prepared to go back for the win next year! You can see more pictures of this year's event here: History Bee 2010

In the end, we decided it was much better this way because they would have misspelled his last name in the newspaper anyway. Who wants to be famous with the wrong spelling? (On his paperwork for this event, our last name was spelled 3 different ways, NONE of them right!!)

We celebrated his incredible feat with waffle cones at Bruster’s, where he proved once again, that he is my “Ice Cream Charm” because they had my favorite flavor, Graham Central Station. Only one of the MANY reasons we are so proud of him…

Way to go Matthew!!!