The top 100 school champions from throughout the state, as identified by the National Geographic Society, assembled on March 30, at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, for the 19th Annual Washington Geographic Bee.
Among the champions, for the third year in a row, was Madison Middle School sixth-grader, Sean Keller. He was accompanied at the bee by Tim Owens, Eastern Hemisphere teacher, as well as by his parents, younger brother, and great uncle. Keller was the only student from a West Seattle school to qualify for the state bee.
The morning preliminary round, of eight questions each, was necessarily brutal. Its purpose was to reduce the field from 100 down to 10. The questions came from the National Geographic Society. There is widespread sentiment, from observers and contestants alike, that the questions prepared annually by the Society do not present a level playing field from one question to the next. Keller was torpedoed by two such aberrant questions. His otherwise strong performance of six correct answers left him one shy of advancing to the tie-breaker round.
In addition to the chronic problem of inequitable questions, Keller's preliminary round was tainted by a moderator who could neither recognize nor pronounce many of the geographic place names and scientific words in the questions. It was so bad that contestants to whom he was addressing a question repeatedly had to tell him how to pronounce the words in the question.
The tie-breaker round in the morning, and the final round in the afternoon, had different moderators. From the audience, Keller was able to enjoy such questions as these: Wood Buffalo National Park is in the Northwest Territories and in which Canadian prairie province? Which body of water is connected to the North Atlantic by the North Channel and St George's Channel? Belize is to Great Britain as Suriname is to ____? (Answers: Alberta, Irish Sea, the Netherlands.)
The state geography bee culminated a busy week on college campuses for Keller. Only two days earlier he had been a member of the Madison Middle School district champion math team at the University of Washington.
