ConVal senior Liam McCall was one of 14 students nationwide to win a spot in the national finals for the International Deutsch Olympics, and competed in a two-day German language contest in Chicago on Dec. 6-7. He placed fourth out of the seven students competing in the higher level category.
“He represented ConVal well,” German teacher Cindi Hodgdon wrote. The competition was sponsored by the Goethe Institut, a global German cultural nonprofit. Hodgdon said she and fellow German teacher Elizabeth Concannon put together a trivia packet for their students that served as the first round of competition, and the top four students in each language level were asked to compete in an online round sponsored by Goethe Institut. The top seven overall finishers in each language level category were then selected to compete in the national finals, she wrote.
McCall said the two days of competition took place downtown, in the Goethe Institut’s Chicago office. McCall was the only competitor to fly out of Manchester, he said, and his favorite part was talking to the other competitors, who came from around the country from a diversity of backgrounds, some with an impressive repertoire of languages. There were no spectators, McCall said, besides the Institut staff and the judges, who were mainly German professors from the Chicago area.
The speaking, listening and reading portions of the competition were interspersed with excursions around the city with the staff from the Institut. “Chicago’s a cool city,” he said. The group saw the Sears Tower, ate deep dish pizza, and went to a German Christmas market. “The Germans there seemed to like it,” McCall said.
What was the toughest part of the competition? “A lot of it is confidence,” he said, but that it was difficult to confidently go up and speak with only four years of German, when the professors evaluating the competitors are either native speakers or have been studying German for years.
McCall, 16, is currently a senior and is taking German 4. “I picked it up fairly quickly,” he said, and that his brother had taken German before him. He will take the Advanced Placement exams for the course next semester.
McCall plans to go to college and is currently applying to schools. He said he’d like to study in the physics and engineering field, and “will absolutely” continue to study a language.