In my life I have only been unerringly good at one thing, and that was English MACC. “MACC” stood for “Mountain Academic Competition Conference,” and “English” designated the subject matter of which I – a four-time MACC champion – was master.
“It was like Quiz Bowl,” is what I’ve mumbled, wanting to change the subject, on the few occasions I’ve tried to explain MACC in my adult life. But that’s not true. It wasn’t like Quiz Bowl. There were teams and buzzers, sure, but MACC was all about possessing narrow expertise. You had to be a hedgehog, not a fox.
English MACC worked like this: at the start of the academic year, team members received the List, a document containing the titles and authors of fifty-two (or maybe fifty-four?) works of literature. The bulk of these were poems, short stories, and essays, but there were also eight or ten novels and a similar number of plays. Every year, a few titles were added and a few cycled out. Matches between area high schools were held in the winter and spring, on Mondays, and culminated in a bracket-style championship tournament and Superbowl in which champion MACCers from different regions faced off.
The first half of an English MACC match consisted of a number of questions directed at two competing teams. If Team A missed their question, Team B got a shot. The second half was a buzzer round. And the best questions, the ones I lived for, always began: “Name the source and the author of the following quotation…”
“He finally come into his manhood today, didn’t he? Kind of like a rainbow after the rain –”
BZZZZ. A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry. Bring it.
“Reader, I forgave him at the moment and on the spot. There was such a deep remorse in his–”
BZZZZ. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte. Bring it harder.
“Oh, the carnage of August–!”
BZZZZ. “A Christmas Memory,” by Truman Capote. I MYSELF AM BRINGING IT.
“Cannon to r–”
BZZZZ. “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” by Alfred Lord Tennyson. Come on come on come on COME ON.
“So we b–”
BZZZZ. The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald. Yes.
I’d get pretty worked up, and the more questions I got right, the louder and more incoherent my inner monologue would become. I tended to channel my aggression at the luckless individual – usually a school administrator – stuck at the podium reading the questions I was determined to interrupt. I couldn’t channel it at the other team. I couldn’t think about the other team.
In spite of the feelings of exuberance and aggression and sheer happy winningness that would well up after a few successful buzz-ins, I was usually scared to death up there with my buzzer. The fear never really went away, even after it became clear that our team, FCHS, was almost unbeatable. (We did lose, once, in a Superbowl meet my junior year. Mercifully, I remember very little about the actual match, but I remember we went to Fazoli’s afterwards, where one of my teammates gave me a rose her boyfriend had given her, because, in that moment, I “needed it more.”)
There were other kinds of questions – about plot, motivation, character (“What reason does Leper Lepellier give for joining the ski corps?”). There were a few questions about grammar. Once we nearly lost a championship match because the answer written on the judge’s sheet was wrong. The question was whether “dancing to communicate their food sources” was being used as gerund or a participle in a long sentence about bees. Our coach (the inimitable Ms. Martin, a true-blue English teacher who always wanted me to read something off the MACC list, to my very great irritation) knew that the answer we had given was correct, and insisted that we challenge the judge’s ruling. We won.
I liked my teammates. My best friend Nicole was on the team; she was two years older and her friendship meant that the other older girls accepted me. (My rural Virginia high school went from eighth to twelfth grade, and being an eighth-grader was pretty awful.) By the time I had become one of the older girls – and we were all girls – the team had grown big and jolly; we weren’t all close, but we had fun at practice, and on long bumpy bus rides to away matches at other high schools. Much as I liked my teammates, at heart I didn’t care about teamwork. I cared about naming the source and the author of the following quotation. Ms. Martin, who must have found me frustrating, would sometimes make me sit out the first round of a match, so that other girls could play free of my intensity and scowling and bossiness. But the buzzer round was all mine. Until I was a senior, at least, when my little sister – who is about a million times smarter than me – joined the team, and I reached a degree of crazed competitiveness that only graduation could finally halt.
Years later, when I had graduated not only from high school but college, I went to a party in Brooklyn, and a boy yelled out my name, the whole thing, first and last. I didn’t know who he was, but he knew who I was. He came from my part of Virginia, which is rare enough, and he’d been on a Social Studies MACC team in a different high school. He’d seen me play. He was impressed, but above all, he was tickled to be talking to me. Reader, maybe I should have married him. I don’t remember his name now, but that encounter gave me the greatest feeling. How often do you meet someone who has been dazzled by you at your shining best?
Being a champion took its toll. In the early years, I would get so nervous before a match that my stomach would ache horribly and my hands would shake. I’d read in The Roanoke Times that smiling decreases pain, so I’d potter around school all day trying to smile – gray-faced, fingers trembling, bent over nearly double, teeth bared in a hideous approximation of a grin. I was also usually “dressed up” for a match, which meant, in those days, a flower-print J.C. Penney dress worn (sensibly) with hiking boots and thick white socks. Since I was only thirteen when all this started, there was some talk of cheating. But I wasn’t cheating. I had simply found that I could read the same fifty-two, or maybe fifty-four, works of literature, over and over and over, without getting bored. And that was really all it took.
The fact is I didn’t have anything else going on. I didn’t have a boyfriend. I didn’t get cast in school plays. I didn’t do particularly well at other extracurriculars. (I treated high school debate as it should be treated: an excuse to stay up late in the Charlottesville Howard Johnson’s with Nicole – who was my debate partner, too – and take long road-trips to regional meets with Miss T, the team coach, who let us wave at the truckers as we sped down the highway and introduced us to the inimitable joys of listening to CCR late at night on the road.) My hometown was a lonely place for a literary kid – and I didn’t even live in town. MACC was the center of my world, which sounds sad, but really wasn’t.
There have been lasting benefits. I have read Jane Eyre so many times that – though I don’t by any stretch have it “memorized” – when I pick it up, it feels worn and familiar, and I often know what the next word is going to be. (Unfortunately this is also true of the unforgivably mopey but pretty well-written A Separate Peace, scenes from which sometimes scroll through my mind’s eye without permission.) When I lived in California, I’d sometimes turn on the radio to find “Selected Shorts” playing, and I’d yell out the source and the author to impress (or annoy) my husband: “The Monkey’s Paw” by W.W. Jacobs! “The Rocking-Horse Winner” by D.H. Lawrence! “Through the Tunnel” by Doris Lessing! Turning on the radio and hearing those stories was like seeing an old friend I hadn’t thought about in years but still really knew, from way back when.
Some texts elude me, though. For whatever reason, I could never remember much of JFK’s famous Inauguration speech, and I never buzzed in when it was quoted. Julius Caesar has been reduced, in my memory, to one quiet moment, the farewell between Brutus and Cassius: If we do meet again, why we shall smile / If not, why then, this parting was well made. Others come back in even smaller fragments. There’s a Carson McCullers essay on loneliness and being American that begins something like, “Consider this city, New York – consider the people in it, the eight million of us.” I don’t remember the name of the essay, or what comes next. But since moving back to the city this summer, alone and without my radio or my books or, for that matter, my husband, I’ve been rolling that line around my head. The way you roll a pebble around in your hand. Absentmindedly, for comfort.
This right up my alley. I always felt especially satisfied when beating everyone in the mythology portion of the New Jersey Classical League Certaman.
I also had a knack for memorizing portions of books, which was always helpful on the “identification” finals one of my English professors used to give. (Thanks, Prof. F!)
Did you catch that habit of quotation from Uncle Peter?
*slaps buzzer*
PLACET!
My spouse and I decided jointly to get married, in a reasoned, considered adult way that took into account things such as his student loans and my need for health insurance. There was no proposal, no engagement ring aside from my grandmother’s that I mostly put on so people wouldn’t bug and/or pity me, no fanfare.
But dammit, part of me still wishes he’d leaned over and said, “Placetne, magistra?”
Damn I wish there were an entirely Gaudy Night based quiz show. I would rock it. Now there’s a book I’ve pretty much memorized through constant re-reading.
I feel this. I never joined any competition-based activities in school because I knew instinctively that my competitive streak would swallow me whole and I would someday emerge out of a rage blackout, totally naked and screaming in the middle of a meet–it’s good to know your limits. So when our academic team coordinator asked me to join I lol’d and dirtbagged out of there. But I did date and was friends with many members of the team, so I always felt adjacent to it (and a crush of mine was our team’s specialist on the buzzer-round literary quotes, too).
But in college I met someone who, when I said what high school I was from, froze and asked me, “Do you know [So-and-So]?” who was our academic team superstar and valedictorian a few years ahead of me, and I said yes, and she said he was the only person who ever beat her, and she remembered his name and hated it in her heart. So I told her my one claim to fame was that I made a higher grade in Humanities than him, and I was the only person ever to do that, and it bugged him. She hugged me and treated me nicely for years for that.
I confess that one of my deepest joys in high school was the no-holds-barred competitiveness of my trivia team, from which I emerged, beautiful and terrible as the dawn, at the end of senior year.
Man, I miss it so much.
I admire your self-control and enjoyment of your competitive spirit! You know, your “beautiful and terrible as the dawn” reminded me that my husband was really active in his high school academic team and also enjoyed it very much (or at least he enjoyed the smackdown very much). Legend has it that he went full Kevin Gnapoor on a snotty private school team after his motley crew annihilated them.
I LOVE THIS STORY.
I had the worst, most enduring and debilitating crush on this garbage truck of a boy when I was a pre-teen (uh, and into my teens, it was a Problem), and he was generally regarded The Smartest Kid In Class regardless of the class. Nerd all the way to my bones with no social grace and a whole lot of indignance about the idea of girls possessing inferior minds, I decided that the way to his heart was SURELY to prove myself his intellectual equal–if not superior.
So one time in the sixth grade we were having a Trivia Game Quiz Party in Language Arts, and he and I both made it to the final round WHICH I WON. Spoiler, it did not make him like me. In fact, shortly after that, he was moved up a grade. The next year, I joined Math Club, because he was in Math Club, and some of my friends, and I liked math, and the teacher running it, and I was not awful at it! Except, the thing was, I was nervous all the time, because of my terrible crush on that garbage boy, and once I was talking about my cat, and my friend asked if my cat’s name was my pet name for that boy, and he was IN THE ROOM and I just turned so red and denied it and demonstrated by walking on all fours that I was talking about my actual real feline animal. And Math Club means going to Math Club Competitions, and our awkward team of nerds did terribly and THE BOY I LIKED DID NOT LIKE ME. I continued in Math Club thereafter, but added Impressive Books to my repertoire–mostly Shakespeare, with notable exceptions being Of Mice and Men and Death of a Salesman.
I cannot even begin to say how relieved I was when I discovered that I was finally over that thing and realized that boy was lazy and casually misogynistic and woefully unimaginative and took himself entirely too seriously in the way the Scholarly Men tend to do. I have held him in my heart as “kind of a shitweasel” ever since and it feels pretty awesome. And I hope it still bothers him that I beat him with the sandstone question when we were eleven.
Once we nearly lost a championship match because the answer written on the judge’s sheet was wrong.
Lord, but this sent me into an instant indignation flashback. No, Vladimir Nabokov did not write The Once and Future King. I don’t care what the damn card says.
(In retrospect, I should maybe not have imputed so much evil to a social studies teacher who was dragooned into coming back to school on a Saturday morning to read questions to a bracket of tense and aggressive geeks.)
Oh god. In elementary school, we had a similar literature-based contest called Trivia Pie which stole shamelessly from Trivial Pursuit, including using the actual game pieces. But I didn’t know this, because I was a little kid, and had been introduced to Trivia Pie first. So I was consequently outraged at Trivial Pursuit’s BLATANT intellectual property theft from a tiny central Illinois school district.
I once lost a match because when asked in the nursery rhyme round “Who sings for his bread and butter?” I could only come up with “Tom” instead of “Little Tommy Tucker.” They DIDN’T GIVE ME THE POINT. I was EIGHT YEARS OLD. I am still scathingly bitter about this.
Actually, come to think of it, they asked “Who sings for his supper?” and I was able to come up with “Tom…they gave him bread and butter!”
STILL NOTHING. NO POINTS. WE LOST.
This is so lovely. I was on a quiz bowl team in high school & you’ve just made me realize how much I miss buzzers and/or yelling the answers to things.
This is bringing back all the memories from the glorious years I spent on my school’s High Five Challenge team (we were champions in 2002! I won a watch!); now I desperately want to find a buzzer to hit.
Obsessive reading to avoid social ostracism FTW. That may have been the only reason I got anything worth getting on my SATs.
Love this article. My high school didn’t have MACC (I’ve actually never heard of it til now!) but we DID have Spell Bowl. And oh man was I invested in (and amazing at) Spell Bowl. It was like a spelling bee, except with teams, and you could write instead of spell out loud. And this is how a group of teenagers ended up with inside jokes about words like “eleemosynary.”
The other night I was at a bar trivia night and there was a group round, and the subject was geography. My team was conferring with another team, and this guy’s girlfriend was hanging all over him, and she was like “he was in the state geography bee in middle school!” It gave me so much pleasure to be able to say “me too. state finals.” The academic competitive streak never goes away.
I loved this–I would’ve been totally into MACC if it’d been an option for me. (my highschool friends eventually banned trivia games from our social gatherings because I’d school up on them too much.) also “I MYSELF AM BRINGING IT” made me laugh out loud.
apparently when I was 4, my parents asked me what “famous” meant (after I declared that it was my goal to become so,” & I replied “when people know who you are but you don’t know who they are.” so technically, MACC made the author famous, at least to that one guy!
Must share link to the quiz show bit from the Young Ones:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm6VLr1LIuY
Oh, wow, I feel you about the sickening nerves. I don’t know how you did it. I was an inveterate competition hog in high school, but I favored ones where you quietly wrote things on paper and turned it in. A math competition once, and many years of timed writing competitions, some French vocab tests. I did compete in a Thespian tournament a few times (reciting monologues) and won a French spelling bee once, but no one can buzz in on you during those activities. ::shudder::
All of this was very well and good for college applications, but like you, I mainly did it because I didn’t have any more tempting trouble to get into. No regrets. Nerding out was fun and there were usually free snacks.
Thanks Laura for reminding me of many AP English classroom competitions and former Quiz Bowl teams!
I love teenagers….they are always so charged up for these events. Nothing else matters except the most recent answer!
Ooh, where outside of Charlottesville? I was in Greene County, near Stanardsville.
That closing! This essay is fantastic, but that closing is a full-on Ortberg-style attention-demander.
This article fills me with deep and sickening regret that I did not know about MACC in high school, because lord, I would have CRUSHED it. I was that kid who had Twelfth Night memorized by the second week of class discussion in ninth grade. But it’s probably a good thing, because undoubtedly I would have become a monster. Nothing brings out that delightful combination of terror and raging egoism in a nerd like a public display of their skill set.
Oh my god, my team also went to Fazoli’s after matches. Is there anything better than unlimited bread sticks to soothe the pain of a loss?
One year, my Academic Challenge team was ranked pretty highly and was in a position to go to Regionals for the first time in years. Our adviser forgot that we had a match, and our assistant principal had to drive us there in a school van because the adviser hadn’t charted a bus or even shown up to school that day. We arrived halfway through, and our score was low enough to drop us down and we didn’t qualify.
I’m still bitter as hell.
That’s rough, but at least you have an excuse. My Knowledge Bowl team had a good chance to go to Regionals my senior year and we just tanked the qualifying meet. I think our faculty adviser was more pissed off than we were, but it is something I regret. My brother’s team tanked AT Regionals two years before us, and honestly for me, that was more motivation to get there than anything else. We had fun, though, which I think is the important part (that and all the inside jokes).
LOOK UPON MY WORKS YE MIGHTY —
The local pub quiz is not a safe environment for those around me.
I wish my high school had this. As it was, I always crushed it when my English and History classes played trivia review games before tests. That excellent nerd pride of being your side’s “pick” for the final jeopardy question.
Oh, man, this is amazing. We didn’t have MACC in California, or Quiz Bowl, or any of those things, but reading about this now I really really really wish we had. I had to content myself with spelling bees (which helped me realize that the precise level at which I stopped caring about how words were spelled was the level of “drilling for district competition while on vacation”), as well as romping through district and county Math Field Days, Language Arts Field Days, History Days, and what I assume is the Christian version of Quiz Bowl…AWANA BOWL. Snottily knowing the answer to everything was my JAM in 5th-9th grade, you guys.
“If we do meet again, why we shall smile / If not, why then, this parting was well made.”
Why did I not know this line was available to say during every break-up?
Awww, I miss academic team! And I’m super jealous that your team was all girls! I was the only girl on the team the one year I competed, and even though I more than earned my damn spot in the varsity line-up, there were a couple dads who were upset because they thought that their precious little boys had been passed over for “affirmative action reasons.” Ugh.
My husband grew up in Yogaville and I love going back to that area for holidays.
I am horribly competitive in quiz environments. A few months ago the university of which my library is a part held its annual staff quiz, and my library provided two teams (the standard group who apparently go every year, and another of anyone else who wanted to go, including me). I spent my teenage years with my parents dragging me to pub quizzes and getting us all to watch University Challenge together and compete, and have strict rules about quiz ettiquette (no shouting out the answer, in case the neighbouring teams cheat; spell everything properly; DON’T BE WRONG). My attitude was not hugely conducive to bonding with my co-workers. I was extremely tense when anyone who wasn’t me was in charge of writing the answers, because how could I trust them to be right? (We beat the other team from our workplace by one point, much to my glee. I may have been giving them the finger during the quiz.)
I made it onto my college’s University Challenge team and got to be on TV and meet Jeremy Paxman, much to my dad’s delight. It was completely terrifying, though.
Oh, that would have been so my thing if we’d had it at my school! We had the regular Academic/Quiz Bowl, and I was on the team in Jr. High and in High School (until I dropped out of school, anyway). I knew nothing about subjects that didn’t interest me — so, I was of no use for huge portions of every match (Math, heavy Science, most US History) — but I was the _only_ one who ever knew anything about literature/fine arts/opera/&c. So I always got to be in, for every round of every match, and I was usually the reason we’d win — because it turns out most of the (almost exclusively male) jr. high and high school nerds on all the other teams knew as little about those subjects as the male nerds on my own team. I was our special secret weapon (who spent most of every match not contributing anything useful). It was kind of great. (Note: to this day, if a subject doesn’t interest me, it basically ceases to exist in my world — so at least I am consistent?)
We had something similar, but it was called “Battle of the Books”. The book list was different every year though, and didn’t contain any short works. I can’t remember ever feeling so validated as when our 6th grade B-team, with me as its captain, beat not only our A-team, but every other 7th and 8th grade team at the school. I’d always had something of an intellectual chip on my shoulder, coming from from a less-than-affluent home with parents who prized athleticism over brains, but in that moment I felt unstoppable. Ah the pre-teen hormone rush.
I had the worst, most enduring and debilitating crush on this garbage truck of a boy when I was a pre-teen (uh, and into my teens, it was a Problem), and he was generally regarded The Smartest Kid In Class regardless of the class. Nerd all the way to my bones with no social grace and a whole lot of indignance about the idea of girls possessing inferior minds, I decided that the way to his heart was SURELY to prove myself his intellectual equal–if not superior.
So one time in the sixth grade we were having a Trivia Game Quiz Party in Language Arts, and he and I both made it to the final round WHICH I WON. Spoiler, it did not make him like me. In fact, shortly after that, he was moved up a grade. The next year, I joined Math Club, because he was in Math Club, and some of my friends, and I liked math, and the teacher running it, and I was not awful at it! Except, the thing was, I was nervous all the time, because of my terrible crush on that garbage boy, and once I was talking about my cat, and my friend asked if my cat's name was my pet name for that boy, and he was IN THE ROOM and I just turned so red and denied it and demonstrated by walking on all fours that I was talking about my actual real feline animal. And Math Club means going to Math Club Competitions, and our awkward team of nerds did terribly and THE BOY I LIKED DID NOT LIKE ME. I continued in Math Club thereafter, but added Impressive Books to my repertoire–mostly Shakespeare, with notable exceptions being Of Mice and Men and Death of a Salesman.
I cannot even begin to say how relieved I was when I discovered that I was finally over that thing and realized that boy was lazy and casually misogynistic and woefully unimaginative and took himself entirely too seriously in the way the Scholarly Men tend to do. I have held him in my heart as "kind of a shitweasel" ever since and it feels pretty awesome. And I hope it still bothers him that I beat him with the sandstone question when we were eleven.
That's rough, but at least you have an excuse. My Knowledge Bowl team had a good chance to go to Regionals my senior year and we just tanked the qualifying meet. I think our faculty adviser was more pissed off than we were, but it is something I regret. My brother's team tanked AT Regionals two years before us, and honestly for me, that was more motivation to get there than anything else. We had fun, though, which I think is the important part (that and all the inside jokes).
Holy shit, Laura Kolb! It’s Erin Sharp!! I was in MACC with Laura and am here to confirm that she crushed every team we were up against all through high school. She was also fantastic in Forensics, particularly senior year when she did “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It gave me chills every time. I’m so happy that you’re teaching!
Erin!!!!
Erin!!!!
Laura, I’m Lucas Kline, and I played Social Studies and All-Around MACC for Blacksburg from 1996-1999 (I also did debate and forensics!) I came by this piece from Jonathan Schneller and Ariel Schneller, who were on my team. I can’t say if it’s your name I remember directly, or just that Floyd always killed it in English. That’s probably because your best MACC coach/teacher was an English teacher — our main one was Ms. Coston, a social studies teacher, so that was our best team. Thanks for the terrific essay and the memory trip — makes me want to start a league for adults, who would of course get destroyed by high-schoolers…