Bobby Hawthorne
Academics Director
This summer, the Texas Educational Theatre Association presented to the Legislative Council Academic Committee a proposal that would, if approved, increase the number of points awarded at district, region and State Meet for one-act play.
It wasn’t. But the committee did approve empaneling an ad hoc committee to study the Spring Meet Schedule of Points later in the winter. This gives all interested parties time to sharpen their blades.
No doubt, the present point system is a patchwork of compromises and spurious assumptions. Why do the 2-hour Ready Writing contest and the 10-minute Number Sense contest receive the same points? Why is CX limited to 48 points at district? Why doesn’t a school that wins first, second and third place individual also receive the additional 10 team points?
I don’t know. These decisions were being made back when my biggest headache here was whether some student journalist in the ILPC summer workshop was going to torch Jester Dorm.
Presently, a one-act play troupe may earn no more than 48 points, even if it wins first place, takes home both best acting awards and has three or four all-star cast members and a couple of honorable mention all-star performers to boot. This strikes the theatre folks as unfair.
Meanwhile, the math and science people can’t understand why they’re limited to 37 points if they place first, second, third and fourth in number sense. Does the winning team, they want to know, receive 10 points or not? Six students may enter science, but the maximum number of points a school can earn there is 42, which means that if you placed first, second and third, and have the top scorer in Chemistry, Biology and Physics, you’d receive 42 points rather than the 56 you earned.
Journalism and speech have team points but don’t have teams.
Ready writing doesn’t have teams or team points. Computer applications doesn’t have teams, but they want them. I’m sure they’ll want the extra points too. Frankly, the piecemeal mess makes congressional redistricting appear logical and fair.
The point schedule has always had its peculiarities. For example, in 1978, the number sense champion received 15 points but the editorial writing champ received only 10. The golf medalist received 10 points, the district tennis champion five. The winning one-act play received 30 points, but points were not awarded for individual awards such as best actor or all-star cast. In 1982-83, the two winning unranked one-act plays split 70 points and received points for individual awards. First, second and third place winners in the other academic contests received 15, 10 and 5 points each except for Debate, which received 20, 15 and 10. In 1988-89, the academic team concept was introduced into the UIL program, the brainchild of former director Dr. Bailey Marshall and academic director Janet Wiman, with the intention of building camara-derie and a greater sense of community identity. For the better part, it has worked well.
Point limitations were not enacted until 1992-93. One-act play was limited to 48 points, everything else 37. Precisely how this was decided is a mystery, but I’m sure it’s based on the reluctance to award points twice to the same students. In time, points have been awarded to second place teams, to team journalism and team speech, so today, we have a hodgepodge of points, some of which correlates to medals, some to number of participants, some to the amount of effort and time required to win a medal. But if there’s any strict linear logic to the Schedule of Points, it eludes me.
And there well may never be. Again, who’s to say which is harder: science or headline writing? Which is more intellectually demanding, reciting four lines in the one-act play or a long, first-person narrative in the interpretive speaking contest? Apples and oranges. The ad hoc committee’s task will be to examine all the quirks and peculiarities of the "a Band-Aid for every sore" point schedule and return to the Academic Committee in June with a proposal that will, I’m sure, satisfy few but will be at least reasonably defensible.
Conflict pattern
We’ve had requests to revise the academic conflict pattern also. The particular complaint comes from those who want to compete in Literary Criticism and Spelling and Vocabulary, which currently conflict. We could move one or the other to the third strand, but it would then conflict with Prose and Poetry. I haven’t heard a lot of support for that idea. We could move one or the other to the fourth strand, but that means judging would end around midnight.
The conflict pattern is a giant Rubik’s cube. You can’t move one contest without impacting two or three others. Until there’s a consensus for change, it’ll most likely remain as is.
Calculator lists
The list of approved calculators for Math, Science and Accounting are also hopelessly outdated. Radio Shack doesn’t even make calculators any more, ex-cept for the basic 4-function, $6.99 ones. Most of the calculators on the list are commercially unavailable except as collector’s items on e-Bay.
This past year, calculator applications director Dr. David Bourell met with an advisory committee to revise and update the contest. David and his commit-tee tried to minimize the emphasis on any particular brand of calculator.
"The goal is for contest success to be as independent as possible of the specific brand of calculator used," he stated.
The revised format of the Calculator Applications contest will be inaugurated at the 2005 spring meet. Similar changes in the Mathematics and Science contests are inevitable. Before we know it, handheld computers will flood the market, making calculators obsolete. Mike Lorion, head of Palm’s educational sales, told The Dallas Morning News, "It’s a matter of how many devices a student can really have. You can’t use a graphing calculator in English class. You can adapt the calculator, but you’re not going to read War and Peace on it. You can on a Palm."
I realize that opinion is mixed and emotional. At last year’s State Meet, Larry White asked how many coaches and participants wanted to change the list? About a third of the hands went up. How many wanted to keep the list without change? About a third of the hands went up. How many wanted to scrap the list and make math strictly a mental contest. About a third of the hands went up.
It doesn’t take a math major to realize that change will be difficult and contentious. But it’s necessary, and it’s long overdue.