Fast-forward to the Friday before the HSNCT: the policy team qualifies for Nats, by virtue of making it to the semifinals at Last Chance. For the next 3 weeks, those people who resent the excessive room mathletics has taken over the last 3 years will be happy for those VAs attending national tournaments.
The Venomous Agendas' quiz bowl team is assembled in the parking lot, with some of the students and faculty, especially those on the other academic teams and their friends, with a few parents of quiz bowlers for good measure, catching one last glimpse at their quiz bowl darlings before they go off and compete at the HSNCT.
"For me the next three weeks will be the most important weeks of the summer, starting with the HSNCT. It's our third participation in a row, and good luck!" Sadie shouts.
Anna is last to get ready to put her baggage into the coach's car because she is the last on the quiz bowl team to finish her final exam this morning. As she gets out of the school building with Valerie prior to leaving the town... Valerie appears a little nervous.
"Valerie, I don't need to remind you of whose legacy you will be compared to. No matter what happens over the next two years, if you ever are questioning yourself academically or in the mathletic arena, please remember the size of the intellectual requirements to even attend MOP" Anna tries to calm Valerie down.
As much as I would like to say that it's just about how differently my brain is wired compared to Valerie's, and sometimes I feel like my own brain seems to crave intensity, quiz bowl is intense in bursts. MOP, on the other hand, is intense in a much more sustained manner, and I am not sure I would have liked practicing math at that level of intensity. It seems unhealthily intense even to me, and I'd like to think I have a pretty good tolerance for mental intensity, Anna gets triggered by the mention of the size of the MOP's intellectual requirements she made mere moments ago.
"And the same with you in reverse, Anna. You seem to absorb stresses of other people like crazy, just as you absorb knowledge like crazy, too" Valerie then tells her friend, before Anna boards the coach's car to Atlanta.
"Good luck then" Glen then wishes all players on the quiz bowl team before they leave the town.
"Thank you"
As soon as the quiz bowl team's final exams ended, they are herded into cars before they leave town on a road trip to Atlanta. Warren's and the parents of the player who replaced Cristiano as the science player, starting from LQBA Winter Invitational South. They all look forward to playing the best teams in the country.
Upon returning home that day, Valerie starts attempting to solve the latest EGMO in an attempt to appease her father. She has been putting off solving that set to study for the finals. I can't disappoint my father, so I need to practice for the TSTST in Pittsburgh next month, Valerie muses while she spends all afternoon solving a grand total of 3 problems out of the 6 (not necessarily all from the same day) Jennifer was made to solve last month, somewhere in Europe.
"Honey, what are you doing?" Glen asks his daughter.
"Solving the last EGMO?" Valerie answers him, with doubt in his voice.
"Please, stop! You will have three weeks at MOP to do contest math all day, so until then, the time between now and MOP would be better used doing community service for Four-H!" Glen then screams at Valerie, who then stops solving the 2026 EGMO. "I want you to be fresh for MOP because it will be exhausting, and do an activity without competitive pressure"
"Why Four-H? The local Four-H club is filled with people who can't fit in the extracurriculars we offer at school!" Valerie vehemently protests, while pretending to care about the IMO. "Plus Four-H would distract me from practice I need so that I can get to the IMO!"
"Not to mention FFA kids because the FFA season is already over. But Four-H would allow you to make a difference in people's lives, and attending the kind of college for which the IMO would actually prove your trump card, as opposed to MOP, want to see some community service as well" Glen explains to her. "It's your only window you have to do community service under Four-H"
Because mathletics has crowded FFA out to the eyes of the high schoolers in town, it's the middle school that administers the local FFA (Future Farmers of America) team for both divisions so the high school division isn't contributing anything to it, not even some pro-rated share by student headcount. Probably because would-be high school students who would otherwise do FFA might instead be drawn to the exotic allure of any of the 3 academic teams. Almost anywhere else where both middle and high school divisions coexist, the high school either handles the team in full or pays a pro-rated share of the team's bills.
At the dinner table that night, Selena looks in the mailbox and hands over the envelope from the Department of Education in Bâton-Rouge to Glen, right in front of the other two:
"Yes! My superintendent license!" a jubilant Glen jumps for joy even though the rest of what he wanted the license for has not yet played out.
"Mathletics. If you became superintendent, who would be the candidate for principal most likely to maintain mathletics as it currently is?" Selena asks her husband.
"To be honest I have no clue as of yet, I'll cross that bridge when I'll get there. But until MOP starts, I don't want any of you talk about mathletics!" Glen warns his family, while Valerie installs the companion app for the HSNCT and follows the Venomous Agendas on it as soon as it's installed.
Yet, to Glen, the cold, hard truth is that some schools have willing mathletes but no money. Lacassine in particular had willing mathletes but no money in part because of its absence of girls on the tentative roster. Sure Lacassine won't have any gate revenues from mathletics, but the superintendent believed that spending $200 in Title IX money on a team that consistently gets the recipients to the AIME and the VMC final is a better use than $200 on an unproven math team. I wonder if getting the parish to pay the entry fees, which, for all of the parochial math teams, would help.
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For the next 2 days, the entire parish seems to talk about the HSNCT, as the Venomous Agendas rack up the wins and appear poised to go in deep, even without Imélie. First St. Croix Prep, then Boston Latin on Saturday afternoon, then Walt Whitman on Sunday morning.
Then NAQT's livestream is set, on Sunday afternoon, on the game pitting the VAs against... DCC. Detroit Catholic Central. All three are gathered around it:
"Detroit Catholic? After everything I heard about that place from Chantal and Daisy, they don't do mathletics, and they made it to Nats in LD by the skin of their teeth! Is quiz bowl the only thing they're good at in academic competition?" Valerie asks, puzzled by how a school the VAs' fanbase widely considered inferior up to this point could get to a top-12 at the HSNCT.
"Sadie is asking for a timeout and had to be helped off the stage!" Glen points out to the other two. "Fingers crossed, Anna; may you be able to hold on to this lead. Good luck, Anna; you're going to need it!"
The crowd in Atlanta gasps in horror when they see a nauseated Sadie being carried off the stage. Anna and the other VAs, however, know they will face a much steeper climb going forward, now that Sadie is paying the price for her excessive stresses. As such, Anna takes on an immense amount of pressure for the last 3 toss-ups, of which she answers one correctly.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Going into the final bonus, people in both Jefferson Davis Parish and Novi (a.k.a. the city in which Detroit Catholic Central's campus is located) watching NAQT's livestream are on the edge of their seats. The Shamrocks (i.e. DCC players) answer 0 or 1 bonus part correctly, the Venomous Agendas would then win, otherwise the Shamrocks will.
"Even though Anna might not be as good as Imélie, she is still good enough to get the VAs to twelfth place" Selena comments when the final bonus part was answered correctly by the Shamrocks, after failing to answer the second part. "I have great hopes for next year"
Then comes the panel interview with the board as well as the head of HR for the parish's school board on Tuesday.
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Of course, given how undesirable the position is among the parishioners, in that the superintendent is often the go-to scapegoat when things go wrong in the parish's schools, Glen believes the panel interview is just a formality. However, he is wondering whether he will convince the parishioners to let him take the reins of the parish school district. He knows that, if he doesn't, the position will go to some out-of-parish assistant superintendent or principal who might not be familiar with the realities of the parish, or even the realities of rural school districts in general. And that might hurt the parish's kids.
"As principal, you had your school's debate team bused around for inter-state tournaments. Do you realize how wasteful your school's extracurricular ambitions made the Venomous Agendas look inside the parish?" a Lacassine board member asks him. "What do you have to say in your defense?"
"First, attending inter-state tournaments in person offer opportunities for students that can't be obtained in online inter-state debate tournaments or in local tournaments. Second, the tournament you're referring to, Grapevine, is the furthest away from this parish that they are authorized to compete in. And the Venomous Agendas are competing at the national debate championship this year; surely the cost of attending the NSDA Nats is well worth it to the parish since it gives the parish a better reputation than it would have otherwise"
This interview feels more like a questioning session in front of a legislative committee to him, with all the stress this implies. He attempts to defend his extracurricular decisions made as a principal in front of the board before he had a chance to explain his plans for the parish's schools. Questions included a cost-benefit analysis of fielding an interscholastic debate team, and then the other 2 teams the VAs fielded. And in debate as well as quiz bowl are the VAs the only operational team in the parish.
"Why is it that you are questioning whether the VAs should keep fielding both a quiz bowl and a debate team when they're both nationally competitive? Say what you will about the brains of the kids who made it that way, but this region is poor in smarter kids. These teams represent where these kids can be themselves, and also it's because the region is a little poor in smarter kids that I wanted to make the most out of those we do have. Send these same kids to a school with much higher-performing student bodies and, while they might be able to handle the rigors of these schools, they will be spread far thinner in terms of extracurriculars, so they won't necessarily perform the same. We already can't offer a whole lot so we must support what little we do offer, and because we can't offer much, they work harder there" Glen explains to the rest of the board.
The elephant in the extracurricular room is, of course, the very nature of these activities creating a perception of the size of the intellectual barriers to entry. Which another board member briefly touched upon.
"It appears that fielding academic teams disproportionately benefit the strongest kids. What rationale do you have for us to continue supporting these teams?" another board member asks him.
"Gifted kids are often special needs, too. Mathletics is a cost-effective way to help them, and I always used home-made role models to inspire the rest of the student body. Drawing attention to mathletics in such a way that mathletes are presented as role models helped the kids"
A whopping 86% (26/30) of the players across all 3 VA academic teams this year have a 3.8 GPA or above, and over half the players having 3.9 or better. which is where, historically, the top-10% and top-5% marks respectively lied in the parish. So not only the majority of the top 5% played on these teams, the majority of the players were in the top 5%, too.
His plan for the parish includes items such as accelerating students more systematically in elementary and middle school, stopping the academic favoritism towards athletes and integrating financial literacy into math courses. That was just the academic part, however.
Once the panel interview ends, Glen sighs, and then goes back to his school to handle the year-end reporting.
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After work, he goes out to buy groceries where he is treated to predictions the townsfolk make about what they expect out of the debate team at Nats. He couldn't help but notice that several kids bag the groceries in a fundraiser for the town's 4-H club, including his own daughter. And Anna, too.
"How far do you think our own will perform at Nats?" Faith's mom asks him.
"Personally I feel like Chantal has what it takes to go all the way, but Sadie's so overworked that I don't expect much out of her pair. She doesn't actually feel that much better than Florence to me; two years ago, Flo was estimated to be a middle of the pack speaker at Nats" Glen answers Faith's mother.
"If Florence was good enough to be nationally competitive, how come then I never heard about her anyway?"
"Back then, the only ones who cared about the debate team were people who dealt directly with the team and its players. You will find that debate flies under the radar in a school's local community in most schools that play. Losing playoff games at the state championship might have broken the hearts of these people, there just weren't a whole lot of them"
Phew, no talk of mathletics; radio silence from the middle school math team's coach. Even debate, which is a somewhat common fixture in urban and suburban schools, is a relative novelty here. That's why the town embraced debate for the time being, Glen muses while realizing that most schools playing at Nats have more affluent and higher-performing student bodies than the VAs'. And often in districts where high schools don't hold a community together the way it happens in rural areas, if public (private schools often dominate the debate circuit so the VAs are underdogs to the eyes of so many, especially since few rural schools qualify).
Once he gets to the end of his shopping for groceries, he picks a self-service cashier station and his daughter bags the family groceries in reusable shopping bags.
"I have one week until MOP, I have to make my time among the Four-H count, so later this week I will be doing mental health awareness outreach with Anna" Valerie tells her dad after she finished bagging the family groceries.
"Good: it's not about the hours you put in, it's about what you make of it" Glen tells her father before he leaves.
And then the middle school math team coach responds. Grading the final exams of his students must have taken him a while. By now he knows that I ask, at year-end, for female prospects, and how they stack up against past female mathletes. Salome might be the best mathlete in the incoming class, but, as much as I cherish every single one of them, every new girl makes me nervous. Even Nicole. Nicole is definitely not IMO material, but she proved invaluable at the VMC final, since she won the Lasedri Prize. Here's to hoping Salome is IMO material then... a train of thoughts hits Glen after reading the answer from the middle school math team coach.
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In the days to follow, he hears predictions about Nats, centered on Chantal and Sadie of course; however, the day before MOP starts, he helps his daughter pack her luggage before she is dropped off in Bâton-Rouge as with last year. Once in Bâton-Rouge, he has one last talk with his daughter before she leaves for the MOP and hence the TSTST in Pittsburgh:
"Don't forget: even if I don't become superintendent, you'll be the star in the parish for an entire year. You know what the parish will expect from you" Glen harangues his daughter, suitcase in hand.
"I don't need to be reminded of the parish's expectations" Valerie then starts crying, wondering how many girls the VAs will have to go through before getting one of their own to the IMO, knowing that counter already hit 9. "Sometimes I wish the parish is more equitable in how it doles out the pressure"
"What do you mean, the parish doesn't pressure students equitably?"
"Anna, Chantal, Joe and Sadie are the star players on the other two teams, and they aren't under nearly as much pressure from the townsfolk as I am" Valerie keeps crying before elaborating on the debaters. "You would think that, since debate newly burst onto the national stage, our debaters would feel pressured to prove to the parish that they have what it takes to remain there, to be worthy of their attention"
"You seem to be implying that the parish only has a fixed amount of pressure to distribute among its students. Which makes it funny to me that you talk about equity in pressure" Glen laughs about the implications of being more equitable in how the parish doles out the pressure. "Good luck, and may you place high enough at the TSTST to be in the race to the IMO!"
If that's pressure equity my daughter wants, she needs not look any further than the other people at MOP. Most of them come from schools where mathletics either flies under the radar regardless of performance level, everyone is under pressure independent of mathletics, or both, Glen thinks about his daughter's pressure predicament as he leaves the airport.