Bobby Hawthorne
Academics Director
Though perhaps best
remembered for his
literary relationship
with J. Frank Dobie and
historian Walter Prescott
Webb, former UIL director
Roy Bedichek’s day job was
shaping the League into an
extension of his philosophy
of competition.
He was an intellectual, but not an effete intellectual inasmuch as some of his personal habits would make a longshoreman blush. Still, he read Plato with his pre-dawn coffee and morning stroll through his garden. He knew by heart long passages of the Iliad and the Odyssey and had read deeply in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Greek tragedies, Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Whitman. Though he believed that life was a matter of survival, Bedichek feared unfettered competition for the sake of local entertainment. He wrote: “Just how to develop the fighting instinct without making gamecocks or bulldogs out of our children; just how to utilize rivalry in education without allowing the genie to run amuck; just how to graft upon this bitter stock cutting that shall bear the fruit of kindliness, goodwill and mutual aid and mutual respect; just how to turn the power behind an absolutely egotistic impulse to good uses in the life of the individual and to society — this is the problem that has exercised not only the minds of philosophers but of practical educators in all ages.”
Of course, Bedichek was referring primarily to athletics. But educators have also debated the educational value of academic competition per se and, in Texas, UIL academic contests in particular. For example: “I have been the UIL science coordinator before, and the UIL form of competition is not science. It is a trivia contest in the form of a multiple choice test. There are no careers in science that involve who can take the best test. This could not be any further from what science is really all about. Science is a process more so than a body of knowledge. And it is that process that should be held up and stressed through competition.
“I do not think cramming as much trivia into your head as possible is going to prove to be very useful down the line. There simply isn’t real thought involved in the UIL test-taking process.”
I am not a science educator and cannot speak knowledgeably about the inherent scientific value of the UIL science contest. I accept it as an article of faith that all UIL academic contests are inherently valuable inasmuch as they require students to explore, to prepare themselves, to work with others, to think deeply and skillfully, to persevere and to learn to win and lose gracefully. In the process, they learn something about the world within and beyond.
I don’t believe UIL academic contests are a hodgepodge of intellectually bankrupt, disconnected trivia. Quite the contrary.
UIL academics encourages learning as an exciting endeavor, one that instills in students a desire to continue to learn throughout their lives. Ready writing doesn’t merely teach sentence structure and grammar, and informative speaking doesn’t merely train students to mindlessly albeit fluently gabble on whether or not Ben and J Lo are going to make it as a couple.
Current issues and events doesn’t require simply a short-term memory of people, places and events. It requires that students understand what these people, places and events mean.
All UIL contests require students to think and express themselves with intellectual discipline about matters of substance.
That’s the philosophical side of it anyway. On a more practical level, we work closely with the Texas Math/Science Coaches Association, which advises us on a wide range of matters affecting not just the math and science contests but the entire UIL academic program. I have a close professional and personal relationship with Faye Parish, Brad Friesen and the rest of the TMSCA leadership. They’re good people, and I trust and value their input.
At no time has TMSCA advised that the UIL change its science contest. To the contrary, a few years ago, when I, in a moment of frightening pretension, suggested the League divide the science contest into separate biology, physics and chemistry contests, TMSCA members stated politely but unequivocally that they wished to retain the contest in its present form. Should the TMSCA leadership and members — or the hundreds of current UIL science coaches — express their dissatisfaction with the current contest, then we will respond.
I realize the UIL science contest does not satisfy all requirements for scientific inquiry and exploration. We do not pretend that any UIL academic contest represents the alpha and omega of a specific discipline, whether it’s journalism, speech communications, mathematics, drama, social studies or science. Rather, UIL contests are an extension of the classroom, complementary to other extracurricular endeavors and competitions.
I have serious qualms with any school that confuses UIL competition with basic curriculum, that, for example, limits its journalism program to an endless repetition of UIL news and feature writing prompts rather than having students write real stories about real people and timely issues for a real student publication. It is also important to understand the UIL must conduct the science contest — and all of its contests — at district, region and State Meet levels in a fashion that is consistent with the time and space limitations of the Spring Meet academic program.
A lot of our science competitors also compete in number sense, calculator applications and mathematics. I have a feeling they might be pressed for time if they spent the day building and crashing robots into one another.
But of course that’s an uninformed opinion, so I asked two of our science directors, Dr. Linda Gaul and Dr. Denis Kohl, to weigh in on the question of whether UIL is real science or a glorified trivia contest. Dr. Gaul is an epidemiologist with the Texas Department of Health. Dr. Kohl is a professor in the UT-Austin Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
“Is the UIL science test a perfect measure of a student’s science knowledge? Of course not,” Dr. Kohl stated. “Ideally, there should be both a ‘book’ component with extensive hand-written and hand-graded material, a comprehensive oral presentation and a ‘hands-on lab component.’
“If we can all agree that such an ideal procedure is not viable within the UIL contest framework, then we can ask what is viable.
“The complaint about the science contest mentions the robotics competition which gives students a great experience in design, teamwork, etc. The two types of competitions are very different but that doesn’t make one better than the other. A student who competes in robotics may or may not be involved in robotics in college, but he/she will certainly be required to be involved in the courses that reflect exactly what is emphasized by the UIL science contest.
A student who competes in the UIL science contest may be able to place out of science courses in college and take courses in robotics in college. “Either way, it is the participation in high school competition that is valuable,” Kohl added. “If the UIL contest is just a measure of knowledge of trivia, then all of our high school and college courses have the same problem.”
Added Dr. Butler: “This is a familiar refrain. Yes, science is a way of thinking about the world, not a body of facts. However, it is very difficult to test a person’s way of thinking about the world, especially when they are young and don’t have much experience with the process of science.
“In my view, the purpose of teaching science in grade school should be to give students some basic understanding of the world around them. Ideally, it should also pique their interest, and they will feel some of the excitement about it that we do. But teaching science is not the task of UIL. This task belongs to the school system and to a certain extent the parents.
“The task of UIL is to reward students who actively pursue an interest in science with some of the means to obtain further education,” she added. “It was decided a long time ago, by people I don’t even know, that these rewards should go to those who show the greatest ‘ability’ in science. This is a laudable goal, in my mind. But assessing ability is never easy. My philosophy is that students who read widely in science, participate and perform well in the classroom, and in other ways attempts to educate themselves in science will accumulate a body of knowledge about the world around them. As they accumulate this information, they will begin analyzing it — comparing pieces of information from different areas and noticing patterns, questioning seemingly odd bits of ‘fact’ and otherwise extending what they know into new areas.
“Considering the logistical and other difficulties of conducting personal, unbiased interviews or using some other individualized means of assessment, we use multiple choice exams. We ask a wide variety of questions over a wide variety of subjects. I firmly believe that a person who has been spending time accumulating a body of information about the world around them and then analyzing this information will do better on these contests than someone who ‘crams’ in a lot of trivia immediately before participating in a contest. The term ‘trivia’ is often used in referring to scientific knowledge. But it is used by people who don’t understand how the world around us is made up of a lot of very small parts, and you have to accumulate and fit together a lot of these pieces before you can develop a solid understanding of the subject matter.
“We can have long debates about the use of terminology in science,” Dr. Butler said. “There is a lot of it, and I’ve read that the average college freshman biology class has more new vocabulary words presented than a typical freshman foreign language class. I try not to ask questions such as what is the name of suchand- such a structure. But a lot of this terminology must be learned. We can’t be saying 10 words every time we want to discuss ‘mitosis,’ for example. We need to learn the term and its meaning. I believe the UIL contests we write are useful indicators of the quality of a person’s education in science.”