La Grande Pride
April 2025
Volume 6, Issue 2 www.LaGrandeSD.org
La Grande School District Newsletter • Love, Care, Serve La Grande High School
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On March 12 in the library at La Grande High School, 36 students convened in their respective teams to participate in the annual Academic Bowl led by Pat Des Jardin, who teaches math, physical science, chemistry, and physics. Des Jardin, who is also the National Honor Society Advisor, promotes and works with kids to get them to participate in the Academic Bowl. “This is my seventeenth or eighteenth year of teaching for the district and my thirty-sixth year of teaching overall,” Des Jardin said. “I’ve done the Academic Bowl for about twenty years now.” It’s a nerd competition with teams of five or six students. Des Jardin asks questions from a set of books that he has, and he gives them a little time to figure out what the answer is. They write their
answer on a piece of paper, and they hand it to a table judge. After a certain amount of time, Des Jardin reads out the answer, and if the students get it correct, they earn ten points in the first round and twenty points in the second round. “The competition lasts all the way through the afternoon,” he said. At the very end of the competition, whatever points a team has, they can bet up that can bet up to that number of points on the Academic Quiz, a set of five questions. Depending on how they do on that quiz, they can either go up by their bid or down by their bid and several numbers in between to decide who wins the competition. Continued on page 10
The academic questions center on English, math, social studies, geography, limited questions about sports, trivia, and pop culture.