People are funny!

Especially when they are in high school.

I had the unique and high honor of accompanying seven of the high school interns that I mentor to an environmental science competition called the Envirothon a couple weeks ago. What a sight we must have been - a bunch of Asian-American kids (OK, they had a token white girl) and their white women mentors, battling it out against 14 other teams of... dare I say... hicks (which I mean in the nicest possible way). Us: (sub)urban, AP-exam taking, raucous kids. Them: Carhart-wearing, FFA-attending, rural white kids from other counties. Not that we kicked butt - we did OK, with one of our 2 teams placing 3rd overall. One reason for our poor showing in general may have been this statement during the oral presentation: "It takes 300 acres of solar panels to power one." The judge asks, "One what?" The intern's reply - in all seriousness, "One lightbulb." Good lord. Oh, the laughter. And possibly the funniest part is that when we got their scores back the other day, THAT team did way better than most other teams on the oral presentation. We suspect some end-of-day slackness in the scoring.