Academic Decathlon

Post date: Feb 11, 2020 9:45:10 PM

On Friday, 1/31/20, I volunteered to help run the speech portion of the regional high school academic decathlon that was held at Thunderbird High School. I helped train the judges and timers, set up the classrooms, direct students, answer questions, collect score cards, and organize the feedback. I really enjoyed having the opportunity to see this event in action. I was really impressed by the students and by all of the wonderful people who gave up their Friday evening to help.

This was my first time at an Academic Decathlon and the volunteers in charge of both speech and the entire event were also brand new to Academic Decathlons, so this was a learning experience. The training for the judges and the timers was scheduled for the same time, in the same place, with the same trainer, so we had to find an empty room and I had to help lead the training so the trainer could go back and forth. The directions in the email that volunteers were sent said to go directly to the training room, but the signs pointed volunteers to the media center to check in. As a result, half of the volunteers checked in and were assigned a room number, and half didn't. This made it confusing when we tried to assign rooms in the training. To solve these problems in the future, we will stagger the training sessions for the judges and timers, and we will have all of the volunteers report directly to the training room so we can assign the rooms.

Throughout the event, I really enjoyed visiting with the high school students as they waited for their turn. Most of them were really nervous and struggling to maintain their composure. I took this opportunity to teach them some breathing techniques that I teach my students during our units on the mind-body connection and stress management. The students were very grateful and they said that the breathing techniques helped them calm down and think clearly. I told my college students about this experience to demonstrate a real world application of the skills they are learning.