What bowl?

Today our 12 y.o. represented CAJ at an interschool competition called Brain Bowl. It is basically a trivia competition. You've seen plenty of these sorts of thing, Sale of the Century, for example. We Australians, though, have not seen a competition between schools of this nature.

I think it is a tiny bit corny that they use the word "bowl" and it is (at least the middle school competition in Kanto Plains) in the same week as the "Super Bowl". But when I googled the term, actually Quiz Bowl is the generic term used in the US, I found a whole lot of other bowls (and brains). Wikipedia says these kinds of competitions in schools and universities in America are called by these names:


Academic Bowl, Academic Challenge,Academic League, Academic Team, Battle of the Brains, Brain Bowl, Brain Game, College Bowl, Brain Brawl, It's Academic, Knowledge Bowl, Scholar Quiz Bowl, Scholastic Bowl,Scholar's Bowl, and Nerd-Squad.


Leaving the "bowls" and "brains" aside, I need to tell you that my husband is intimately involved in this competition too. When he first arrived at CAJ, he discovered that full-time teachers were required to coach something. Well, not being a particularly sporting person that was a problem, until he discovered that the school was looking for a Brain Bowl "coach". It was like a marriage made in heaven. This is the man who humiliated me in front of my family when we were engaged, by thrashing me in a game of Trivial Pursuit (we've never played another game). This is the man who remembers all sorts of amazing, unimportant facts . . . until you need them in a Brain Bowl competition.


Turns out our son is chip off the old block. He also knows all sorts of amazing, relatively unimportant things . . . but he makes a good Brain Bowl participant. And he loves it! These students not only get a day off school, but they get to practise answering trivial (oops, um, important, um, how does Wikipedia put it? "all topics of human knowledge") questions for weeks before the event during their lunch hours . . . for fun, can you believe it? 


Well, odds are, some of you can. Just not I. I'm just happy with a simple cereal bowl for breakfast thank you.