Tuesday, April 14, 2009

LTC

This past weekend (Friday and Saturday) I participated in LTC, which stands for Leadership Training for Christ. This was my first time to do it, so I only chose 2 activities to do, Chorus and Bible Bowl.

Chorus is basically the same thing as Choir, but we don't use musical instruments while I think that some church choirs do. I also heard that it is called Chorus so it won't be confused with a regular church choir.

In Bible Bowl, the topic this year was the book of John. (Each year the topic switches back and forth from the Old to the New Testament. I think next year's is 2 Samuel). You spend as much time as you can reading and re-reading the topic book for that year. You also go to practices to help you see what it will be like in the actual competition.

On Easter weekend, all of the LTC participants from your church travel to a hotel which has specifically reserved the rooms that weekend only for LTC'ers. All of the events are hosted in the hotel. There were about 1800 children participating in the location our church chose to go to (not all from our church, of course) and that doesn't count the parents and siblings, so you can see that it is crowded!

In the actual Bible Bowl competition, you go to a huge room with tons of tables lined up in rows. There are 4 people to a team, and your team sits one behind another, not beside each other. The announcer reads a question over the loudspeaker, such as, "In the beginning was ________. A: The Word, B: God, C: Satan, or D: Moses."

You have a cube in front of you with each side labeled A, B, C, D, or E. You also have a sheet of paper next to you with the same questions that the announcer is reading. After the announcer reads the questions and possible answers, they ding a timer, and you have five seconds to think about your answer. Then they ding it a second time and say "Locate your answer." After five more seconds, they ding it a final time and say, "Reveal your answer." You turn the side of the cube with the letter you chose toward the front, where a table judge is sitting. You have to have your hands off of the cube when the announcer tells you to show your answer or your answer will be counted as wrong.

There are 100 questions in shifts of 25. After each 25 questions, you get a 5 minute break where you can eat a snack or go to the bathroom.

I got 3 questions wrong, so I got a score of 97, which is an individual Gold Medal. My team also did well enough that we got a team gold medal. Our Chorus group got a gold medal also.