COD hosting Illinois Geography Bee
Jakob Myers and the Illinois Geography Bee have been on a collision course since he ripped the wrapping paper off his third birthday present: a globe.
That globe inspired the sixth-grader at Lisle's Kennedy Junior High to study places near and far — knowledge he recently used to become the school's reigning Geography Bee champion.
Myers will test his geography IQ again Friday, April 1, when he joins 98 other contestants from throughout Illinois at the state's Geography Bee at College of DuPage.
“I've always loved learning about all of the places in the world and thinking about what it would be like to live or travel there,” Myers said.
Organized by the National Geographic Society, the bee includes students in fourth through eighth grade competing against each other by answering geography-related questions about regions, cultures, food, current events and climate throughout the world.
The winner of Friday's competition travels to Washington, D.C., May 24 and 25 to participate in the national competition to be aired on the National Geographic Channel.
“Everybody thinks the bee is about countries and capitals,” said Michael Middleton, organizer of Friday's contest, who teaches geography at downstate Centralia Junior High School. “While some of that is true, it's such a wide range of topics that these kids are asked about.”
Much like the national spelling bee is about understanding roots, prefixes and suffixes to make an educated guess, the Geography Bee is about understanding regions and cultures, said David Hollander, an eighth-grade U.S. history teacher at Kennedy Junior High.
“It really challenges not just their understanding of geography, but their ability to finesse their understanding into an intelligent guess,” said Hollander, who organizes the school's geography bee every year.
A recent winning question from the national competition in 2009 was: “Timis County shares its name with a tributary of the Danube and is located in the western part of which European country?”
The answer is Romania.
“Anytime they get any right in the final round, I'm always surprised,” said Sue Creadon, LLC director at Franklin Middle School in Wheaton. “There are countries I didn't even know existed, and probably didn't exist when I first studied geography.”
An example of a recent question in Franklin's bee, she said, was “Improving education for girls has been a priority in this country that lies on the southernmost tip of the Arabian Peninsula.”
“The answer is Yemen,” she said. “Now, I wouldn't have known that.”
Students sometimes get clues, such as nearby landmarks or landforms or waters, and have to guess the continent.
The 99 students competing Friday won the competition at their school or home-school group, as well as passed a written test from National Geographic.
They'll begin at 8:30 a.m. and answer eight questions each. The top 10 scorers begin a new round at 12:15 p.m. and answer questions until there are only two competitors left.
While some of the questions have many adults secretly ducking their heads in shame, having demanding questions is all part of the process of whittling down the list.
“You can understand that if the kids reach a certain level of competency, asking them about a state capital may not be the challenge that it needs to be to eventually determine a single champion,” Hollander said. “The questions do reach a level that the layman would not know, nor would they be interested in knowing.”
So how do bee competitors prepare for the event?
Eighth-grade student Blake Hansen, 14, of Arlington Heights says learning capitals is a great starting point.
“Study maps and try to learn the capitals of as many countries as you can and you start to notice all the details of other countries,” said Hansen, a home-school student with the North Cook County Home Educators.
Hansen often combines his two passions, geography and art, by drawing individual countries by pencil — including all the major cities with populations 1,000 or more.
“That helps me study,” he said. “Ever since a very young age I've enjoyed geography a lot. I really loved looking at maps.”
Bee champion Andrew Carlson, an eighth-grader at Franklin Middle School in Wheaton, spent the days leading up to Friday's competition focusing on Africa.
“The one question I did miss (during the Franklin bee) was an African question: which Saharan country had the fastest growing population? It's Niger and I guessed Libya,” he said. “I'm going to study a little more of Africa.”
Fortunately, it's a big, huge world and Carlson seems to know quite a bit about a lot of it — especially his favorite areas in Europe.
“I think I'm going to be a little bit nervous, but I don't know,” he said. “I'm really just going to focus on the goal at hand.”
The final two competitors Friday begin again with three questions and whoever answers the most correctly becomes the state champion.
The state champion wins $100 and receives an all-expense paid trip to Washington, D.C.
The national winner goes on to win a $25,000 scholarship and an all-expense paid trip to the Galapagos.
Jakob Myers may have outlasted that globe he received as a youngster. The electronics in it shorted out a few years back. But he soundly carries that globe's knowledge into Friday's competition.
How's he feeling? Is he nervous facing the other top Bee winners state wide?
“No. I know that — not to pat myself on the back — but I'm extremely intelligent,” he said. “But I know that there's got to be another kid like me in the state, and more than likely that kid will want to win as much as I do. I know that I have to beat that kid if I want to go to the nationals.”
Does Jakob have any parting thoughts on the upcoming competition?
“No, not really. Except, you're probably going to have to write another story on me when I win the nationals,” he said.