Happy August. July was lovely. I caught up with friends and family, did some house projects, and mostly, took countless naps with Mr. Maximilian on the couch. The combination of an eventful school year and a dog who sleeps approximately 25 hours a day, meant the gravitational pull of the couch was inescapable and much needed.
I did a little Jeopardy research (sorting through the dizzying amount of info there is online about what to study and how to do it) in July and was able to meet with the incomparably supportive and enthusiastic Alice Bradley and Holly Catonia from our very own Friends of the Highland Library last Wednesday to do some fundraiser planning. Sneak preview…stump the Teacher AND possibly…rent a nerd (pay for the honor of having me add my useless esoteric knowledge to your team during a trivia night fundraiser).
So, this is my first post about the whole Jeopardy process, so first a little background. The first question everyone seems to have is…”How did you get on Jeopardy?” The simple answer is I took the entry-level 50-question test on the Jeopardy website, probably some night that I had a day at work where my lesson flopped or my students were 0% interested in following directions and I was wildly flailing for some sense of competence in a chaotic universe. At some later date (I have no memory of when I took the 1st test online), I got an email that said I made it to the next round. That round was on zoom, it was another 50 questions, and we all had to leave our cameras on to make sure we were the ones answering the questions. There were about 50 people in the group and afterwards, the production assistant leading the meeting answered our questions about the process. One of the other hopefuls asked the most wonderfully specific, nerdy question I have ever heard. “Can you tell us the number of questions we needed to get right to pass the test?” The PA very politely said she could not. “OK. Can you tell us if that number is fixed or variable?” She smiled bemusedly and said “I can’t tell you that either.” As a teacher, it was a heady feeling to be in a virtual room with a bunch of people (many of them as young as my recently graduated HS students) who loved learning, knowing, asking, thinking. As a “smart” kid who struggled with ADHD at a time when it wasn’t very well understood, it feels great to re-enter the learning stage of my life with more maturity and years of completed graduate work under my belt.
About 2 or 3 months after the online test, I got an email saying I’d made it to another round of testing. I was on hall duty at school at the time and our Assistant Principal, Annie Brennan, was hanging out with me. She saw the panicked look on my face and said “Is everything OK?” I hadn’t told ANYONE, not my friends, not my family, that I was going through the application process for the show. Annie is a warm and supportive person and also, pretty low-stakes to share the info with. I confided that I thought I would likely lose, given the level of preparation and skill many of the recent mega-champions have brought to the show and I didn’t want to take time off work and pay to fly to California just so I could lose on national TV. Annie, in her very Annie way said “You HAVE to go! Don’t worry about winning. It’s the experience. Do it for the fun, for the story.” I told her if I got on the show and needed to ask our Superintendent for time off, I would be throwing her under the bus. So it seems only right to give her due credit here, not just for encouraging me to do this, but also for helping me see the journey as the experience and let go of any worries about winning. Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to win. My mom WANTS to see me win (more on that in a future). But the entire idea to have this fundraiser was born from Annie’s encouragement to let go of any pressure to win. When Alex Williams, former Library Goddess, later told me that the library would put up a poster wishing me luck when I went on the show, this project was born.
Going to the Library on Saturday AM is one of my fondest childhood memories. I LOVED storytime, of course, but what I remember best was the feeling of agency and power I had when I was given free roam to pick ANY book (I think up to 10!) as I wanted. Long before I was consulted on what clothes my mom bought me or given a vote on what we bought at the supermarket, the library was a place where I had full (juvenile) borrowing privileges. It was a temple of learning and freedom to me. From the time I read my first book solo, I could be found in a myriad of settings happily, privately reading a book, from the various boring grown up restaurants that my parents liked (god help them if they picked one with dim lighting!) to countless loud parties in college and my 20s that inevitably saw me sequestered in a bedroom reading Willa Cather, Thomas Pynchon, Jackie Collins (whatever I could find on the shelves) while loud, drunken stupidity carried on somewhere else. So, now, no matter what happens when I go to California, whatever money I’m able to raise for our library is my winnings on the show. To date, I’ve won $2038 on Jeopardy for my local temple of learning.
So, that’s the first chapter in the story of how I wound up preparing for Jeopardy.
Thank you for contributing to the fundraiser if you’re able. And for supporting a 50-year old woman with significant brain fog attempting to do something really scary, but totally for the joy of it.
You can expect new blog entries weekly and if you want to study along with me…this week I’m studying Egyptian Mythology and the New Testament. I’ll check in on that with you next week!
