Congratulations to Weston High School for their impressive performance in the opening salvo of this year’s WGBH High School Quiz Show!

Weston beat Tantasqua Regional by the comfortable margin of 555–440, despite the fact that Tantasqua’s team consisted of four seniors where Weston’s team consisted of one senior and three sophomores. Or maybe sophomores are just better than seniors.

Weston team members Reid Betty, Alex Ding, Benny Gilligan, and William Houston all excelled. And special congratulations are of course due to coach Alison Langsdorf. Since Alison and I are both math teachers, I should point out that the Weston team did especially well in the math category.

I notice that WGBH still hasn’t learned the James Holzhauer technique: the equivalent of the Jeopardy Round in High School Quiz Show requires proceeding in order from lowest point value to highest within each category. Maybe some day they’ll learn.

A week from now Weston will face South High Community School (from Worcester), as you’ll see in the complete bracket below. Feel free to fill in the blanks with your predictions, but no gambling please. My prediction is that April 11 will see a real challenge: Acton-Boxborough will beat Arlington on 2/15 and Weston will beat South on 2/22, but can Weston then beat A-B on April 11? Seems unlikely… but Weston did score more points than A-B in this month’s Massachusetts Math League match, so maybe they could do it again.

Categories: Teaching & Learning, Weston