It’s Thursday night, May 9, 2019, and I just finished watching Jeopardy, “Teacher’s Week” Edition. Throughout the week I’ve been impressed by the knowledge of some of the teachers, and similarly appalled by dimwittedness of others.
Tonight Was a back and forth contest between the three contestants. First was Melissa Okey, an elementary school resource teacher from Panorama City, California. Next was Sara DelVillano, a middle school instrumental music teacher from Lanham, Maryland. And representing the Y chromosome contingent was Conor Quinn, a high school world history teacher from Albany, NY.
Now I don’t watch Jeopardy very often, but like everyone else I’ve been intrigued by the recent success of James Holzhauer, the genius odds calculator who’s won more than one million dollars. So I’ve been watching more regularly the past couple weeks.
Tonight it came down to Final Jeopardy, and my man Conor Quinn had about 10K, Sara DelVillano had 10K, and Melissa Okey had about 5K. So it was a match heading into the finale.
The category announced for Final Jeopardy was “The Cold War.”
When I saw the category announced, I immediately said to myself “I’d bet everything.” Because I knew deep down in my heart and soul that my education at Oberlin College, which included a course on Modern Russian and Soviet Studies, along with my master’s at Columbia in International Relations, plus a general upbringing in an intellectual household that valued education, had allowed me to reach a level where I knew The Cold War pretty well. I was more of a political economy specialist, but I was no slouch on the Cold War.
The question they asked was “The Cold War became entrenched in the mid-1950s after the formation of these 2 rival military alliances.”
You know what? I blanked for a second or two, perhaps under the pressure of the moment. And then it hit me, as my brain recovered from the adrenaline.
The Warsaw Pact, signed in Poland, was obviously the foundation of the Soviet and Eastern European Communist military alliance.
A millisecond later my brain’s neurons fired again and I remembered the most basic American military fact of life in the US from 1945 to 1989: NATO. NATO was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and it the US and Europe to collective defense of one member by all members. In essence it bound the US to the safety and security of Western Europe from Spain due east until Germany against Russia, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
At that point I said to myself, if I, a non-Russia Cold War expert, can answer this question correctly, I pray to all that is holy in the world that these three Jeopardy brainiacs can get it right.
And how did it turn out? Sara and Melissa were both completely off base. Melissa said the US and the USSR, which is the two nations that squared off against each other during the Cold War. But they were nations, not military alliances. So she was wrong.
Sara said NATO and the Soviet Union. She was half-right. A for effort. But not the full answer.\
And then my man Conor Quinn, the high school world history teacher from Albany, NY, revealed his final answer, and he nailed it.
Whew! I breathed a sigh of relief. At least, thank the lord, one of the three teachers actually knows a little bit about what went on during the 44-year Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Now if you want to know the truth, when they announced the Final Jeopardy category as the Cold War, I immediately came up with a better question in my mind: “This 1960’s era Soviet Premier famously slammed his shoe on a desk at the United Nations in New York and told America “We will bury you.”
Who said that? The answer, of course, is Nikita Khrushchev, and anyone with a halfway decent world history education would know that.
But people under 40? No chance, unless they were International Relations or Russian Studies scholars.
And yet it’s such a basic fact, and it was such a foundational moment in the history of the Cold War, which was essentially the history of the 20th century.
So thank you Conor Quinn, world history teacher from Albany. You renewed my faith in young American teachers’ knowledge of the world, at least for one day.
