Sandy boy wins state geography bee

LEHI — Except for the nervous tapping of one tennis-shoe-clad foot, Anthony Cheng is stiff and still. The 11-year-old swallows deliberately, tension visible in the slow tightening of his throat muscles. His fists are clenched. His eyes: staring.

The boy next to him — the only thing standing between Cheng and the Utah State Champion title at the National Geographic Bee — reads his answer hesitantly, "Iceland?"

Realization sweeps over Cheng like a fire creeping up a fuse. He leaps out of his chair, chin up, smile wide.

"I'm so happy," he says, fighting to keep from jumping up and down. Then, as if humbled by the applause in his honor, the boy, wearing a T-shirt that droops halfway to his knees, looks shyly to his feet and rephrases, "I guess I won."

During his battle to the top of the 21st annual National Geographic Bee Friday, Cheng beat out 97 children, ages 9 to 14, from schools all over the state. To qualify for the competition, each contestant won a geography bee at their local school and took a high-school level written test. In May Cheng will head to Washington, D.C., for a chance at the national title.

"I'll have to study even more for that," said Cheng, a sixth-grade student at Peruvian Park Elementary in Sandy. "It'll be harder, I think."

The competition was designed to get kids excited about a subject that — in most Utah schools, at least — is largely overlooked until the 9th grade. Standardized tests like the CRT include geography only as a side note to history and civics, said Norma Jean Remington, coordinator for the Utah Geographic Alliance. Research shows many students in grades 4 through 8 struggle to read a map.

"Geography gets overlooked because people think it's just names and places," Remington said. "It's far more than that. It's what connects us to the world around us."

Because TV host Alex Trebek helped develop the bee's format, the competition unfolded much like an episode of "Jeopardy!" Students answered questions about the locations of cities, rivers and mountain ranges. Using aerial photographs, they distinguished one state from another.

Sometimes they stood, nervously clutching a microphone, to give their answers. Sometimes they scrawled the answers, in big bold strokes, across a pad of yellow legal paper.

Parents in the audience, stared on, open-mouthed.

"I only knew about half of the answers," said Brian Kirk, whose son placed in the top ten. "I just sat there in wonderment thinking, 'Wow. I really am dumber than a fifth-grader.' "

Many contestants spent more than a year preparing for the bee, poring over maps and textbooks for hours each day. Cheng studied by playing geography games online, he said.

"He loves to learn," said his father, Albert Cheng, a software engineer. "Sometimes I'll catch him reading the dictionary."

e-mail: estuart@desnews.com