So, Peter got involved with our American Revolution studies and volunteered to set up a game of Jeopardy, with all questions related to American Revolution, as per the excellent text we’d used. Shiaw-Ling was our scorekeeper and the categories Peter set up were ones like “Four Letter Words” (where the answer was a four-letter word like “Fort” or “Howe”) and “They Went That-A-Way” (personalities who died.) It was a lot of fun, though both Neil and I were nervous. We’d studied the American Revolution–but how much had either of us retained. It turned out we’d both retained a lot of the important information. I even psyched myself out by unneccessarily making myself remember less famous personalities, like James Armistead, the black slave who pretended to be a runaway slave so he could join the British army and thus get intelligence to the Continentals, and this caused me to jump in with “Gustavus Conyngham!” as the answer for the founder of the U.S. Navy (Neil correctly got that answer by pointing out that it was actually John Paul Jones.)
Neil was particularly nervous, since he was going up not only against his teacher, but also one who’d gone through college. What education did he have against that–well, public school through fourth grade, and a month of homeschool. But I didn’t have to pull back in my efforts–Neil was quick on the bell, and had thoroughly retained all he’d learned. In the end, we were tied, and both went for double or nothing on the final question: “Who was Benedict Arnold’s spymaster?”
We both got it right, which either means Neil is as smart as a college graduate, or this college is graduate is as smart as…a fifth grader.