Sanford pupil beats state rivals at geography bee

ORONO – You could have cut the silence with a samurai sword during the Maine State National Geographic Bee, held Friday at the University of Maine.

The preliminary rounds, held in several conference rooms in the Memorial Union, were full to capacity with the state’s most knowledgeable fifth- through eighth-grade pupils, deep in concentration as they tried to answer questions testing their basic geographic knowledge.

Parents and teachers, anticipating the answers, hovered outside the rooms in the hallways.

North Haven Community School eighth-grader Conor Curtin was one of those eliminated in the preliminary rounds.

“I lost on a question about what province the Trans-Canadian railroad terminates in,” Conor said. “I said it was the Yukon, but it was British Columbia.”

Tim Platt, a moderator for one of the preliminary rounds and a Latin teacher at Berwick Academy, said the kids were remarkably proficient in geography.

“Some of the kids are clearly nervous,” Platt said. “But just to get to this level is an accomplishment. They have an above-average knowledge of geography. They’re often just as strong as some adults.”

From the preliminaries came 10 finalists, with the final round moderated by Robert Kates of Trenton, professor emeritus at Brown University.

Most of the questions were in a simple question-and-answer format, but several rounds of questions featured maps and pictures. One round of questions dealt specifically with invasive species brought to North America. Another showed a map of the Earth at night, asking pupils to find a city on the map by identifying the correct numbered location.

Eighth-grader Jonathan Brock of Sanford Junior High School won the bee with the correct answer for a question that asked to what country the island of Flores, where scientists recently discovered a dwarf human species that lived 18,000 years ago, belongs.

Jonathan, an avid history and geography buff, knew the correct answer – Indonesia – which he learned by reading a copy of National Geographic that was lying around the house.

“I just read it a couple weeks ago,” Brock said, who won $100 and an all-expenses-paid trip to the national bee in Washington, D.C., in May.

Second runner-up Alex Homer, a seventh-grader at Ellsworth Middle School, accepted his defeat gracefully.

“I really like to look at atlases. I look at them all the time,” Homer said. “I studied the capitals and memorized them all. Then I tried to memorize all the major cities, but I didn’t get that far.

“Maybe next year.”