By: KEVIN JOLLY
Staff Writer
This year’s Academic Decathlon has officially wrapped up as of last weekend. The El Diamante team will not be advancing to state for the first time in a few years, but still earned numerous impressive scores and goals. Every member of the El Diamante team earned at least one medal, and many were top performers in their respective categories. For me personally, this was my fourth year in Academic Decathlon and it’s allowed me to reflect upon my experience in the program overall.
The topic of this year’s competition was the ‘American Revolution’, meaning we all had to study various topics related to the American Revolution. The topics for every year are art, economics, essay, literature, math, music, science, social science, speech, and super quiz. I personally thought the content provided to study was hit or miss in terms of interest. For example, the social science category had some pretty fascinating contexts to read about for the philosophies and ideologies behind the revolution, but the literature category included one of the first American gothic novels published, “Wieland”, which was broadly disliked for its over complicated wording and sentence structure.
One part of the art category was learning about neoclassical architecture in America. This style of architecture was influenced heavily by ancient Greece and Rome, hence why our White House and Capitol buildings both resemble that of ancient Greece with white pillars and domes. But my favorite piece of art from this category and from neoclassical is Greenough’s George Washington statue. The statue depicts President George Washington as a muscular figure striking a pose resembling a Greek god while adorning robes and holding a sword. It’s for these reasons that the statue was disapproved of, with many politicians being uncomfortable portraying a president, someone supposed to be just another branch of a large government, as an all-powerful Godly or kingly figure. But the absurdity of this representation of Washington is also why I take such a liking to it.
Neoclassicism also ties in with the social science category. The reason early America was interested in this style was that many of the political philosophies used to justify the revolution were directly inspired by ancient Greece and Rome, them being a democracy, republicanism, written constitutions, separation of powers, etc… The social science category also just in general really gave some insightful context and information about why the revolution happened and its impacts. The American revolution paved the way for the rest of the world to accept liberal ideas from those like John Locke, as it was the first major country to build an entire government on those philosophies. One example would be France, which took direct inspiration from the American revolution to overthrow their monarchy, and Thomas Jefferson himself helped write their French constitution. The key to the bastille was even gifted to George Washington.
But the literature, as I mentioned earlier, was disappointing. Wieland initially sounded interesting, it is one of the first American gothic novels and is about a serial killer, but unfortunately was monumentally boring. The story in basic is just a murder mystery with some arguable supernatural elements. All the characters are from very wealthy families which means that most of the book is written about their time lounging around and enjoying their good fortune. The ending actually has a decent twist, but a very anticlimactic and frustrating conclusion.
I’ve been doing Academic Decathlon since my freshman year, so I’ve seen the topics of ‘sickness and health’, ‘cold war’, and ‘water’. In my opinion, this year had one of the more interesting topics, although I did really enjoy sickness and the Cold War, especially “Cat’s Cradle” which was the literature novel for the cold war. I’ve really enjoyed my four years of Academic Decathlon at El Diamante, and I think this year was a good finisher as I outperformed all my previous years and won a total of six gold medals and one bronze. It was also nice to do the competition in-person again, as I had only been in person for freshman year, the other two were during quarantine, but thankfully this year was back to normal.
I would encourage anyone even slightly interested in Academic Decathlon to think about joining. It’s done a lot for me personally in terms of engaging more with studying techniques and having the resources available to learn about some fascinating topics. Not to mention having just the title, ‘Academic Decathlon’ is really attractive for college applications and job resumes. But a case in point, El Diamante has historically been the winning team in the Central Valley, hopefully, this year is just a road bump, and currently, we have a great team, and coach, and are desperately in need of more members.
