By Bobby Hawthorne
Academic Director

For decades, UIL academic contest directors criss-crossed the state, conducting nine or 10 student activities conferences each fall. Each conference would begin at 9 a.m., end at noon, and then directors would undertake the long trek home, loaded into the League’s old Chevrolets.

It was brutal, but you got to know your colleagues pretty well. I remember spending 12 hours in an Impala, crammed between Max Haddick and Milo Weaver, two funny coots who argued politics, religion and mathematics all the way from Austin to Wichita Falls and back. Max would argue physics with Einstein, and Milo, a UT math professor and the League’s number sense contest director, wasn’t short on ego or opinion himself. It made for a long, long trip. To make it worse, Max reeked of tobacco smoke and Milo smelled of old man.

Those were good days that ended, thankfully, in 1987 when, upon the insistence of two or three spouses, girlfriends and assorted significant others, UIL academic director Janet Wiman consolidated the nine conferences into four “Super Conferences,” held at Texas Tech, the University of North Texas, Sam Houston State University and The University of Texas at Austin. Conferences began at 9 a.m. and ended at 3 or 4 p.m., depending on the particular program attended. One-act play typically ended at 4. Everyone else finished at 3. No one ever understood exactly why the discrepancy, but no one had the courage to seek an explanation from Lynn Murray. He wasn’t the teddy bear then that he is today.

The League has since followed this general format. Last fall, we further compressed the schedule by dropping the 90-minute lunch break and conducting sessions straight through: 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Those who need a carbo or sugar rush were invited to bring a power bar or Baby Ruth.

Next year, we’re taking another step in the evolutionary process. In an effort to reach more students, we will conduct conferences at Texas Tech (Sept. 14), Tyler Junior College (Sept. 21), UT-Austin (Oct. 19) and UT-Pan American (Nov. 9). Then, in 2003, we’ll visit four other campuses: UT-San Antonio, the University of North Texas, Sam Houston State and either UT-Permian Basin in Midland or West Texas A&M in Canyon.

We think by going to a rotating schedule, more students and coaches will have a chance to attend a SAC. We figure that over a 4-year period, students and coaches so inclined will have had a chance to attend at least two conferences. At least, that’s the idea. We realize that some areas remain under-served. We need to get to El Paso occasionally. It would be nice to go farther east into the Golden Triangle now and then, or down to Laredo. I’d love to return to the Corpus Christi/Kingsville area, if for no other reason than to gorge myself at King’s Inn. These may come in time.

Attendance at the 2001 conferences was satisfactory, though not as high as we’d like. I prefer to speak to standing-room-only crowds, but I understand the conflicts: Friday night football, cross country, volleyball, college entrance exams, speech tournaments, marching band festivals, sleep-overs, you name it.

We figure we could jack the attendance by having more culturally-appropriate or professionally-useful sessions such as body art for the kids and Prozac management for the coaches. But we refuse to compromise our integrity. If numbers drop next fall, we’ll reconsider for 2003.

As it is, I doubt the League has a more valuable extension service than the student activities conferences. Even as a survivor of the old 10-straight-week SAC tours, I still enjoy attending the conferences, traveling with Dave, LaVerne, Pete and Karen and Marcia and the others, meeting coaches and teaching sessions for kids. And I believe the student activities conferences are the best way for coaches and students to get to know one another, to adopt common goals and strategies, to bond personally, and to begin the long campaign toward district and state.

If you’ve never attended one, we hope you will next fall.

Shared values...

Not long ago, Dr. Farney, Rhonda Alves and I were meeting with a group of middle school principals and coordinators in an effort to drum up support for academic competitions in an urban school district. It was a typical administrative meeting: a few of the attendees were gung-ho, a few were tepid at best in their enthusiasm, a few were not so subtly antagonistic to the idea of contests for academic kids.

One administrator asked, “Why would we want to go to the trouble of having these academic contests? What’s the point?”

I realize that administrators have more problems than they’ll ever solve. Not only are they expected to see that no child is left behind, they have to make sure no one gets shot in the process. Principals have an impossible job. I’m the first to admit it.

But the question really rubbed me the wrong way. So I replied, “It’s odd that no one questions why schools go to the trouble of having athletic contests. It’s accepted as a matter of fact that football and basketball are good for students, schools and communities, whether their team is winning or losing. Perhaps they don’t articulate it each time a kid scores a touchdown or nails a 3-pointer, but people understand that, win, lose or draw, young people who play sports learn sportsmanship, self-discipline, leadership, teamwork, self-motivation and all the other values they’ll need later in life.”

All things being equal, participation is better than non-participation. Young people - all of them - need to be involved in school activities. They need to take risks, set high goals, work hard, compete fairly and honestly, and accept winning or losing with grace.

So, I find it hard to understand why an educator would assume that competition is good for athletes but bad or of no particular consequence for academicians. Sure, it takes discipline to survive summer two-a-days. But it takes as much discipline if not perspiration to prepare for the mentally exhausting Literary Criticism contest. This year, they’re required to memorize the Handbook to Literature, read Sister Carrie by Theodore Drieser, understand the poetry of Gerald Manley Hopkins and memorize the better parts of Jean Anouilh’s Becket. If you think shooting 100 free throws is tough, try reading Hopkins’ “The Habit of Perfection.”

Academic participants derive the same intrinsic values from competition as do the athletes, the musicians and the future farmers. By competing in academic contests, students are better prepared for college entrance exams, for freshman college courses and for jobs that require something more than basic literacy skills. That’s according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, which reports that the number one quality employers seek is communication skills, verbal and written. Honesty and integrity are number two. Computer skills are number nine, behind flexibility and adaptability.

In the wake of the events of Sept. 11, I’ve heard several people talking about how they wanted athletes serving in the armed services. I do too. They’re disciplined. They know how to take and execute orders. They’re physically up to the challenges of the task. But I’d like to think that those athletes also competed in number sense or computer science or Lincoln-Douglas debate because if they did, they’d be able to think more critically, clearly and quickly. In the week following the attack on the World Trade Center, the Austin American-Statesman ran a lengthy news analysis which stated that in order to win this war, the U.S. needs more brain than brawn.

I don’t assume that these are mutually exclusive. They’re not. So why don’t more schools participate more widely and more deeply in academic contests? Given that the argument in favor of intellectual competition appears to be irrefutable, why don’t more schools value academic competition?

It’s often argued that schools refrain from academic competition because their teachers won’t participate. Of course, it’s not hard to blame them if the administration treats academic competition as a thankless burden that brings little status and no stipend. The job satisfaction rates among athletic coaches might drop too if schools stopped paying stipends, refused to provide equipment, refused to pay for transportation to and from games, offered few or no perks such as letter jackets and patches, declined to so much as congratulate winning kids or their coaches via the public address system on the Monday morning following their contests. If they knew their kids could work a thousand hours and win a hundred medals and not a word of it would appear in their local newspaper, they might grouse at being asked to coach softball in addition to teaching six or seven preps per day. Sure, many of them would continue to coach because they love coaching, love the kids, and love the game. But a lot of them wouldn’t.

Typically, schools that offer a modicum of support for academic contests have few problems finding willing, even enthusiastic student and adult participants. Teachers understand that UIL contests provide an opportunity to develop powerful relationships with bright, motivated, dedicated young people, and not just the National Merit Scholars. Every veteran UIL coach has a story or two of how this activity or that saved a kid, challenged her, kept him from dropping out of school, gave her a reason to have a positive attitude, taught her not only what to learn but how to learn it, allowed him to experience a degree of success that then propelled him past the high school diploma and into college, more efficient, more confident, more motivated, more disciplined.

What with the today’s “teach to the test” miasma, UIL academic contests offer teachers a venue to practice the kind of rigorous teaching that they’ve always wanted to do, the kind of rich experience for which they entered education in the first place. It’s an opportunity to share the joy of learning with young people who genuinely want to learn. Sure, all teachers need more time and more money, but no one coaches UIL anything for the fat paychecks. They do so because they love competition, they love what it means in kids’ lives.

This is as true for academics as it is for sports or band or drill team or Chinese checkers or anything else.