National Memory Master Competition, Part 1: Summer-January

In sixth grade, I decided to participate in Classical Conversations’ National Memory Master competition (NMM). NMM is the culmination of CC’s Memory Master program. It is a national competition for sixth graders in the Classical Conversations Foundations Program. Normally, to achieve Memory Master the student memorizes all the material learned for the current cycle of CC. For instance, I first became a Memory Master in 4th grade when I memorized 24 weeks’ worth of memory work from cycle 2, which was medieval history. Achieving Memory Master means reciting all the memory work to your parent, tutor, and director at the end of the year. There is usually a recognition at the end-of-year party for anyone who was able to complete this. NMM takes Memory Master a step further. Sixth-grade students from all over America wishing to participate in the competition complete Memory Master three to four months early. Then, in February, they make and submit an entry video, which tells a story using memory work from a prompt. From all the videos, 16 finalists are selected. For me, this meant one finalist from each of 12 regions, and then 4 more from any region. The 16 finalists went on to participate in a 3-stage competition at the end of April and beginning of May, demonstrating our knowledge of all three cycles of CC, not just the one that we had most recently completed. After the first round of the competition, only 10 students moved on. After the second round, only the top 4 moved on. After the third round, the winner was chosen and awarded a $10,000 prize. That’s a brief overview of the competition, but in this series, I want to show you the behind-the-scenes work that I put into this competition. This first post will talk about the summer months to the beginning of February.

The opening of my entry video

The first step of the competition was to complete the regular Memory Master program a couple of months earlier than I usually would. When I was in sixth grade, we were on cycle 1, which was ancient history. To get a head start, I began studying the material over the summer before I started sixth grade. By the end of summer, I had almost completely memorized the cycle 1 work. When the school year started, I began working on cycles 2 and 3. Some of it I already knew, as I had achieved memory master for those two cycles in the preceding years, but the majority of the work I had to relearn. I spent the entire first semester studying the memory work each day. Using the proof sheets (lists with all the prompts and answers for memory work) in the back of our Foundations Guide, I cut out each question-and-answer group. I put every group into a paper bag and each day for probably about 20 minutes or so, I would ask my parents or sister to quiz me. They would randomly select a prompt from the bag, and I would try to answer. When I wasn’t being quizzed by a family member, I was usually quizzing myself. I also knew that one of the parts of the competition was map drawing, so I began working on that as well. I had also started to think about my video submission. I had no idea what the prompt was yet, so I wrote outlines of stories that could work for a variety of prompts.

In January, the time finally arrived. I had to complete my parent, tutor, and director proofs for the cycle 1 Memory Master. If I wasn’t able to do that, I couldn’t even compete in the competition, so I was a bit nervous. I had to recite all the memory work to my mom with no more than one miss per subject. I had already done numerous practice proofs with her, but I finally had to sit down and do the real thing. I passed that, which meant that the next step was the tutor proof. For this, I had to recite it all again, but this time without getting anything incorrect. I could self-correct, but I had no help from the tutor. Lastly, I did my director proof. For the director proof, I only had to say 25% of the material, but it was randomly chosen by my director. She chose 6 weeks from each subject at random, prayed with me beforehand, and then began asking questions. I was extremely nervous, but I somehow managed to complete it all without any misses. I was now eligible to compete in NMM!  

Now that I had successfully completed all three proofs, I had to wait for the video prompt to be released. The video was my official entry for the competition, as well as how the 16 finalists were chosen. The prompt was released on February 1st and consisted of a selection of similar history sentences. The video was supposed to include as much of the prompt as possible. The prompt for my year (2019) had to do with wars in modern history, such as World War I and II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. For my video, I acted as though I was the tour guide in a museum of 20th-century wars. My video was three and a half minutes long and included 12 of the 13 sentences in the prompt. On February 6th, the competition opened for submissions and remained open until the 10th. I lost count of how many times I filmed my video. I would start and stop. I would make slight alterations to the story, my tone of voice, or my hand motions. On the 6th, I had a video I thought was ready to submit. However, before sending it in we had some friends and family look over it. It didn’t get outstanding reviews as I had hoped. So, we altered some more of the story, changed my hand motions, and filmed some more. Finally, about two days later I had a video that was ready to be submitted.  

That’s my first semester of sixth grade in a nutshell! Next time, I’ll pick up where I left off, and talk more about the process of becoming a finalist for National Memory Master.