Wednesday, February 6, 2008

FOMF

At my school........................ we do FOMF! What is FOMF, you ask? Well:

FOMF stands for Friends of Millard Fillmore (the most obscure US president). It is a weekend long community trivia hunt, intended to foster learning and research skills in high school students. This year it was from Feb 1 - 3 (Friday thru Sunday)... yes, it is always on Super Bowl Weekend, every year. The idea of FOMF is that schools compete against each other to see who can answer the most trivia questions correctly.

My school had 10 captains. I was one of two Operations Captains. We had 2 Proofreading Captains, 1 Tech Captain, 2 Office Captains, 1 Bring-In Captain, 1 Wall Captain, and 1 Library Captain. (most of us were sick or got sick over fomf weekend. but we still perservered!) Together, we managed 200+ people (students, parents, teachers, alumni), and all worked together to figure out the answers to the 80 trivia questions. We then worked on getting our answers documented. We would only receive credit for our answers if they were typed up perfectly and were documented by two reliable (books, newspapers, magazines, DVD's, etc... ANYTHING except the Internet basically) sources. This meant that we were rushing out to libraries and bookstores, photocopying pages like mad, because these photocopies were our proofs.

I personally spent hours upon hours arranging sponsorships from major food chain stores, arranging parent volunteers and chaperones, doing all the paperwork for extra credit forms for students and overnight stay forms for hardcore fomfers, and finally, my most important job: checking incoming proofs from students. This was a mindblearingly tiring job. My eyes tired from staring and highlighting photocopies of books... I slept over both nights, spending about 60 hours at school... I went 36 hours without showering (ew! I know! but it was for a Cause!)... ran around Stanford library and burning my eyes out at the microfiche... I drove like a mofo to Noah's Bagels to grab food donations... I yelled (not at specific people, just general announcements and such) until my lungs burned out and my voice died (and I'm not a superaggressive person...) - unfortunately before adjudication. I couldn't be a lawyer, but I skipped school Monday to help our school's two lawyers prepare...

it was an intense weekend!

(and it's NOT over. still so much paperwork... gah)

Joy

2 comments:

donaldGuy said...

I disagree with the naming rationale... Chester Arthur was so much more obscure than Millard Fillmore .. SO MUCH

Michelle said...

Woah, that sounds amazing! I wish I had something like that at my school. Congrats on pulling that all off.