In Mr. Holcomb’s AP English class, the capstone event of the year was the Literary Scavenger Hunt, an extra-credit tool that had the potential to bump the winner’s grade by a full letter. Only the best performing team could claim the top grade bump. In previous years a Senior was paired with a Freshman from the lower-level AP class, but in my last year of high school the teams were pairs from the same class.
The scavenger hunt was a thick sheaf of stapled pages, each full of obscure trivia to uncover. These were not straightforward questions. Often the question itself would be hidden behind some puzzle, a pictogram or a cryptogram. Holcomb liked the telephone cipher, and I remember several of the scavenger hunt hints obfuscated that way. The telephone cipher is the replacement of letters by the telephone keypad number on which that letter appears, e.g., “the” becomes “783″ and “book” becomes “2665″. Finding the question was sometimes harder than finding the answer.
The trivia ranged from finding the name of a biker gang in an obscure old movie to deciphering the latin phrase that appears in the MGM logo. In 1993, the days before Yahoo or Google, we didn’t have the Internet to turn to. Today Holcomb’s Scavenger Hunt would be no better than a short course in search engines.
Had to drive an hour away to find a video store that rented the 1954 film “The Wild One” but today it takes only seconds on IMDB to find that the name of the rival gang in that picture was “The Beetles”.
Since only one pair — one team — could win the Hunt, collusion was nearly nonexistent. I engaged in some disinformation when other teams would ask for an answer they knew I had. The winning team would be decided by a raw tally of correct answers, found clues, solved puzzles. Some were so easy everyone got them, others fiendishly difficult. It was these tough ones you’d hold onto. I fed lies to rivals; incorrect answers. There was a lot at stake: for some students a full letter grade bump in English could mean the difference between graduation and summer school. Not me, but my partner was in that boat. I couldn’t let her down. Even so, Binoy Patel managed to steal my notes at least once, probably scored himself a few good answers, but in the end it didn’t help him win. (Binoy was a smart guy; I have no doubt that he’s excelled regardless of the outcome of Holcomb’s exercise.)
As much as I love the ready information the net provides — Google and Askville and Mahalo and Yahoo — I’m glad I was able to enjoy an analog offline information search like Holcomb’s scavenger hunt.
Holcomb was a hard teacher. Not in the sense that he challenged his students, but in the sense that he actively put up roadblocks to stop them from excelling. He was the guy who’d draw a line in ink down the left margin of your term paper and subtract points if any line of type didn’t adhere to his one-inch-margin style guide. I don’t think anyone was lining up margins by hand with a typewriter; even as early as 1993 we had an inkjet printer on the 386 and I think all the kids in AP English had access to similar stuff. Holcomb’s pedantic alignment test was just a holdover from tougher times.
The nearby Salinas River flooded Holcomb’s house that year and our term papers were destroyed. The yearbook features pictures of students who hated the man hauling mud out of his family room. My yearbook also features half-angry notes from students I’d screwed over in order to secure the winning position in the scavenger hunt. We either won or tied for first place, but whatever the case we got the grade bump.