![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Something that has nothing to do with work
So right, something that isn't about my job! Today was the regional DI tournament, and I got to be torn between appraising and several wild attempts at sprinting the length of a middle school in order to catch the two high school teams I'd been working with.
I was actually very happy with the way the structure challenge worked out this year. Usually there's no real incentive for the teams to have any sort of skit or props, but either this year we had phenomenally more ambitious teams, or something about having to build out of newspaper and having some small suggestions of scenery and costume requirements actually made teams pay attention to the rest of the challenge. We had a team re-enact the Maldives' underwater global warming summit (only with T-Pain along, too). There was a team with a BBC broadcast and infomercial interruptions (and a fantastic German accent that was, apparently, learned from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. By a tiny, 7th grade girl.) There was a performance about the Knights Templar trying to kill a king for a debt. The story-loving bit of me was downright gleeful. There was also a team that crafted a glass mosaic shoe that was really, really amazing (and apparently took more than 20 hours to make). And the structures, which I suppose were kind of important, were all pretty good, too. They were made of nothing but newspaper and commercially available glue, and several of them held over 100 pounds (two of them held around 160).
I was sad to find out that I wasn't going to get to see either of my high school teams perform, so I visited them all in the early afternoon, wished them luck, and disappeared. Then one of our afternoon teams didn't make it, so I rushed over to their challenge area and managed to catch one of the two teams. I was actually really impressed at what they'd managed to finish over the last couple of days. It was far better than what I'd seen from them on Wednesday, and in fact, was quite a bit better even than what most appraisers expect out of high school teams in general on the regional level. High school teams are notorious for being ill-prepared, for overlooking key bits of the rules, and for bringing in solutions that were invented about 24 hours beforehand. (For this particular team, though, it's kind of a habit, and they work well that way.) Unfortunately, they did overlook a key bit of the rules, which was that there was a giant bit of the floor you weren't supposed to stand on, and if you did it negated your entire score for the mechanical objectives. And... they stood on it. The entire time. I sat there with my face half-hidden in my hands, silently wishing they would at least just accidentally step out of it for a bit, but it didn't happen. And I have no idea how my other team did, because I had to rush back to my challenge as soon as the first team had finished. Their solution had a lot more to it that could have potentially gone wrong, but their team leader also paid closer attention to the rules, so chances are if things went wrong for them, they were technical rather than oversights.
Also, my team of seniors literally stood in front of an entire suburban crowd and, when asked if they were ready, let out a terrifying scream and then shouted "What's the power level... IT'S OVER 9000!!" (This is also the team that was going to do an Elite Beat Agents-based solution, but unfortunately that script was scrapped in favour of a beat poetry story about a delivery boy getting bitten by a dog) I... may have been the only one laughing for the intended reason, but they did get a laugh out of everyone else as well, for absurdity. Also, a friend of mine was quite impressed at their random nerd-pop culture references during another portion of the competition.
Actually, that's one of the things that made things really weird this year. Usually the kids are referencing really weird things, and I know for certain I'm not any more tuned in to pop culture than usual, but this year I got most of their references. So, either these things are on a trickle-down timer, and we've hit the point where the weird sense of (internets) humour that was in its beginning stages while I was in college has extended all the way down to middle schoolers, or... I don't know. (You know what I realized today? A senior in high school this year was a third grader when I was a freshman. A third grader! This means the DI kids I coached my senior year of high school are sophomores, at least. Holy crap I am old).
The other weird thing this year was realizing that there are now a ton of DI alumni being dropped into the system. It was my freshman year when the whole thing started (though OM was around for a long time before that). Now we're to the point that there are kids graduating who've done DI since they were old enough, and a lot of them are coming back in as volunteers. Add to this the fact that we also had a ton (TON!) of people helping on on the Disney give a day get a day thing, and the average age of appraisers at the tournament this year was probably literally cut in half. I think we averaged about 25, and the percentage of us who were teachers was way, way super down, so the scoring, in comparison to years before, was also much more... DI-style. It was bizarre. And... everything ran so much more smoothly. I was kind of stunned. It was like an alternate universe tournament.
Anyway, though I am now very, very tired (I've been up since before 6), it was a very satisfying day. Hooray!
I was actually very happy with the way the structure challenge worked out this year. Usually there's no real incentive for the teams to have any sort of skit or props, but either this year we had phenomenally more ambitious teams, or something about having to build out of newspaper and having some small suggestions of scenery and costume requirements actually made teams pay attention to the rest of the challenge. We had a team re-enact the Maldives' underwater global warming summit (only with T-Pain along, too). There was a team with a BBC broadcast and infomercial interruptions (and a fantastic German accent that was, apparently, learned from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. By a tiny, 7th grade girl.) There was a performance about the Knights Templar trying to kill a king for a debt. The story-loving bit of me was downright gleeful. There was also a team that crafted a glass mosaic shoe that was really, really amazing (and apparently took more than 20 hours to make). And the structures, which I suppose were kind of important, were all pretty good, too. They were made of nothing but newspaper and commercially available glue, and several of them held over 100 pounds (two of them held around 160).
I was sad to find out that I wasn't going to get to see either of my high school teams perform, so I visited them all in the early afternoon, wished them luck, and disappeared. Then one of our afternoon teams didn't make it, so I rushed over to their challenge area and managed to catch one of the two teams. I was actually really impressed at what they'd managed to finish over the last couple of days. It was far better than what I'd seen from them on Wednesday, and in fact, was quite a bit better even than what most appraisers expect out of high school teams in general on the regional level. High school teams are notorious for being ill-prepared, for overlooking key bits of the rules, and for bringing in solutions that were invented about 24 hours beforehand. (For this particular team, though, it's kind of a habit, and they work well that way.) Unfortunately, they did overlook a key bit of the rules, which was that there was a giant bit of the floor you weren't supposed to stand on, and if you did it negated your entire score for the mechanical objectives. And... they stood on it. The entire time. I sat there with my face half-hidden in my hands, silently wishing they would at least just accidentally step out of it for a bit, but it didn't happen. And I have no idea how my other team did, because I had to rush back to my challenge as soon as the first team had finished. Their solution had a lot more to it that could have potentially gone wrong, but their team leader also paid closer attention to the rules, so chances are if things went wrong for them, they were technical rather than oversights.
Also, my team of seniors literally stood in front of an entire suburban crowd and, when asked if they were ready, let out a terrifying scream and then shouted "What's the power level... IT'S OVER 9000!!" (This is also the team that was going to do an Elite Beat Agents-based solution, but unfortunately that script was scrapped in favour of a beat poetry story about a delivery boy getting bitten by a dog) I... may have been the only one laughing for the intended reason, but they did get a laugh out of everyone else as well, for absurdity. Also, a friend of mine was quite impressed at their random nerd-pop culture references during another portion of the competition.
Actually, that's one of the things that made things really weird this year. Usually the kids are referencing really weird things, and I know for certain I'm not any more tuned in to pop culture than usual, but this year I got most of their references. So, either these things are on a trickle-down timer, and we've hit the point where the weird sense of (internets) humour that was in its beginning stages while I was in college has extended all the way down to middle schoolers, or... I don't know. (You know what I realized today? A senior in high school this year was a third grader when I was a freshman. A third grader! This means the DI kids I coached my senior year of high school are sophomores, at least. Holy crap I am old).
The other weird thing this year was realizing that there are now a ton of DI alumni being dropped into the system. It was my freshman year when the whole thing started (though OM was around for a long time before that). Now we're to the point that there are kids graduating who've done DI since they were old enough, and a lot of them are coming back in as volunteers. Add to this the fact that we also had a ton (TON!) of people helping on on the Disney give a day get a day thing, and the average age of appraisers at the tournament this year was probably literally cut in half. I think we averaged about 25, and the percentage of us who were teachers was way, way super down, so the scoring, in comparison to years before, was also much more... DI-style. It was bizarre. And... everything ran so much more smoothly. I was kind of stunned. It was like an alternate universe tournament.
Anyway, though I am now very, very tired (I've been up since before 6), it was a very satisfying day. Hooray!