By Amanda Arp

Correspondent

The United States Academic Decathlon (USAD) is an organization that promotes learning, studying, and social skills in high schools across America. At North Tama, Mr. Kevin Darrow, one of the high school English teachers, is also the Academic Decathlon coach. Darrow, along with assistant Mr. Kent Hanser (a high school science teacher at North Tama), helped two teams of students to prepare for the regional competition, guided them through Regionals, and are now preparing a single team to go to State.

In preparation for Regionals, the students in Academic Decathlon studied a wide variety of subjects concerning the theme of Latin America: the art, music, economy, and history of Latin America, in particular that of Mexico, were studied by the students. Evolutionary biology and math were also a focus of Academic Decathlon. Most weeks, study times such as Tuesday morning, Monday evening, Thursday evening, and Saturday morning and afternoon were not uncommon. Students spent around twenty hours per week reviewing and preparing their speech for Regionals. After about five months of hard work, the two teams went to Regionals.

The regional competition was held at Jefferson High School in Cedar Rapids. While there, the students were separated into their respective grade point averages. Each team has three of the following grade point averages: 3.75 to 4.00, called Honor, 3.00 to 3.74, called Scholastic, and 0.00 to 2.99, called Varsity. The Honor, Scholastic, and Varsity students were placed in different rooms at Jefferson to take their tests. Intermittently during the testing, students had to get up and walk out of their rooms to give their speech or to be interviewed by a panel of judges. At the end of the testing, an oral test of evolutionary biology, called oral super quiz, was given to the students. This, along with the awards ceremony, was open to the Public. At the completion of the Awards Ceremony, both North Tama teams walked away with most of the first, second, and third place ribbons in each category. Of the small school teams present, North Tama’s two teams won both the first and second places in overall point totals (the tests were scored on a 1,000 point scale respectively).

United States Academic Decathlon promotes studying, learning, and social skills, attributes that were enhanced by the students’ involvement in Academic Decathlon. For some of the students, their participation in Academic Decathlon is finished for the year, but for the others it is time to prepare for State, which will be held on March 6th and 7th at Mount Vernon Community High School.