National Geographic magazine’s 2006 geography bee reveals more than top students.
DIXFIELD – In a portable classroom devoid of maps, and with an outside door propped open by a world globe Thursday, 28 Dirigo Middle School students contemplated worldly questions.
It wasn’t a quiz or test. It was National Geographic magazine’s 2006 Geography Bee competition.
In addition to determining which overall student from grades five, six, seven and eight was the top geography whiz, the event revealed a serious deficiency in cultural geography knowledge.
Students cruised through spoken questions that provided possible answers from which they had to pick the correct response, but were mostly stumped when questions didn’t provide a possible answer.
Fifth-grade instructor Kathleen Richards, who asked the questions, said fifth-graders were at a serious disadvantage because they had not yet studied world geography.
“The problem is that eighth-graders should have had everything, but fifth-graders are concentrating on the U.S. now,” Richards said during a break.
Still, the final round came down to two fifth-graders, Alan Spear, 11, of Canton, and Mariah Porter, 11, of Peru, and eighth-grade student Dakota Turnbull, 13, of Dixfield.
During a tie-breaker with Spear, Turnbull correctly answered Antarctica to a question about cold temperatures, after Spear missed his question.
Turnbull won first place and is to complete a written exam Friday, Jan. 13, that could, in six weeks, determine if he moves on to a state competition.
He competed in last year’s annual bee, but didn’t do as well.
“Last year, I had a tough time, but I’ve learned more this year,” he said afterward.
“The questions were not that hard. I knew most of them, but it felt weird to compete against a fifth-grader, but he knew what he was doing,” Turnbull added.
Richards also commended Spear, who glowed with the praise.
“This is the fourth year I’ve been doing this, and I’ve never had a fifth-grader get this far,” she said.
“Wow!” Spear answered.
“That was awesome! I can’t believe I came in second place to an eighth-grader! The questions were really hard. I hadn’t even studied some of those countries. It was pure luck coming up with answers to some of them,” Spear said.
Questions in the early rounds varied from, “Which state is closer to the Pacific Ocean, Idaho or Illinois?” to “Which state produces more petroleum, Oregon or Louisiana?”
Richards’ announcement that Round 6 was on cultural geography attracted loud moans.
“Do we get choices?” one child asked.
“No.”
“Awwwww,” was the collective response.
One such question, incorrectly answered “Christian,” was, “Before World War II, Yiddish was spoken by about 11 million followers of what religion?”
The only two cultural questions correctly answered pertained to Inuit igloos, and origami, the Japanese paper-folding art form.
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