Showing posts with label speech and debate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label speech and debate. Show all posts

8/12/17

On Being Captain of Philadelphia's Top Ranked 1996 Academic Decathlon Team - Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

We had a problem with Talisha.
She was known for being a bad highlighter.
She would highlight everything.

She told us she highlighted only
what she felt was important but it seems
she felt everything was important.

The academic team would sit around and
have conversations about how to address
Talisha’s highlighting problem.

Do we keep her away from team materials?
Do we have an intervention? Someone suggested
giving her two differently colored highlighters,

in an attempt to teach her the difference
between selective highlighting and a free-for all.
Turns out, two highlighters made her problems

worse. We were finally forced to agree
that we’d all just have to accept Talisha’s
highlighting issues, because we needed her.

She was our regional Teen Jeopardy champion,
and was the only one who knew anything about
Victorian Literature.

Sometimes, when I hear stories about other
people’s teen years, I feel like they are talking
about some exotic country,

one I know I’ll never visit: the slang they used,
the boys they kissed, the nights they snuck out,
the parents they’d upset,

all the things they had to worry about
and all the things that they never ever ever
had to worry about.