Some People Peak in middle School
I became a third-quarter captain and never really stopped.
QUIZ KIDS - The Southeast Middle (RIP) National Academic League have risen to the first place in the Eastern Division. They are gearing up for the playoffs on April 2 and will hopefully have teammates picked for the All-Star game on May 2. East Baltimore GUIDE, March 9, 1995.
I recently found this newspaper clipping from March 1995 — The East Baltimore Guide. Southeast Middle School. Quiz Kids headed to the All-Star game.
The green star in the photo is me. :)
From what I can recall, the scratched-out face was a bully. Middle school justice was swift.
I was a member of the National Academic League (N.A.L.), a program that treated academics like a sport. There were officials, shot clocks, timeouts, four quarters of play. Did you have N.A.L. at your school? It was the closest thing to a sports team I’d ever be on.
Each quarter had a focus:
First: strategy
Second: teamwork
Third: problem-solving
Fourth: speed
Third quarter was my universe!
Teams were given complex, real-world problems. We had 30 minutes to develop and present creative solutions. We were scored on organization, content, critical thinking, and presentation.
I was the third-quarter captain. Let me sit with that for a second.
At twelve years old, I was already doing what I do now: helping my group take in a complicated problem, make meaning together, and move toward something coherent. We wrote songs! We made skits! We organized our thinking so it could land. Yes, a middle school academic league is not the same as a national collaborative. But the instinct was the same. Orient the room. Find the shape of the problem. Offer something worth responding to. And have some fun while we’re at it.
I think about lineage a lot. The through-lines in our lives we don’t always recognize until we stumble across evidence. For me, it was a crumpled newspaper clipping tucked into a box.
Some people peak in high school.
I became a third-quarter captain in middle school and never really stopped.