National Tournament Info Soon

Information about the 2012 AGLOA National Tournament at Oglebay Resort, Wheeling WV, will be sent to local league coordinators in December.

Stuart White was one of the founders of the Academic Games Leagues of America (AGLOA) in 1992. Those who have attended the national tournament know him as the Master of Ceremonies at the Junior/Senior Awards.

Stu got involved in academic games in 1972 when he graduated from Syracuse University and moved to Ann Arbor MI to teach.

• One of his fellow 7th grade teachers at Slausen Middle School was Dwight McMurrin. Dr. Layman Allen, the Law Professor at the University of Michigan who invented the Equations and On-Sets games, had brought Dwight from Texas to help start academic games in the Ann Arbor schools.
• Stu recalls that he "watched the children I taught in social studies go Dwight's math class and play games and love it." So when he was transferred across town to Forsythe Middle School to teach math the following year, he began an academic games club. Following Dwight's model, Stu held an Equations tournament in his classroom every Friday.
• That year, he brought players to the national tournament (at Kent State University) for the first time.

The trip to nationals inspired me. Everything about it was what I wanted to be.

• After a year at Forsythe, Stu moved to Clague Middle School.

It was heaven because the school was in its second year. So the faculty wanted to be there and had a passion about doing something innovative, something you wanted to do rather than were told to do.

• He took over the academic games program and headed it until he transferred to Huron High School in Ann Arbor in 1979. So he ranks as one of the few coaches who has started programs at three different schools.

He became involved in the Michigan League of Academic Games in its early stages.

• With academic games firmly planted in the Ann Arbor schools, Layman Allen set his sights on the predominantly African-American school system in Detroit.

Layman got in contact with Gloria Jackson, a math teacher at Pelham Middle School in Detroit. His vision was extraordinary. "I've got this game [Equations]. Let's see if we can bust a few myths and stereotypes about race and achievement."

• The Friday Equations tournaments in Gloria's classroom were the seed for the flowering of academic games in The Motor City when the system's Math Supervisor, Fred Schippert, decided that games like Equations sparked student motivation and achievement.

 
Three of the AGLOA Founders: Jim Davis, Stu White, Larry Liss with their award watches

The growth in Detroit paralleled the increased participation in the suburbs and other areas of Michigan.

• Cindy Hopkins took academic games with her when she moved from Ann Arbor to teach in Bloomfield Hills, an affluent community north of Detroit.
• John Dalida spread the message to the Dearborn Public Schools.
• Another league began in Lansing MI.

MLAG to this day follows the same model used when it began in the early 70s.

• Saturday morning tournaments are held once a month from September through February with students choosing to play Equations or On-Sets (or, later, LinguiSHTIK) during the morning.
• When Stu first brought students to the MLAG tournaments, only one site was needed. As the league grew, it was broken into geographical areas until today there six regions.
• The first state tournament, called the Super Tournament, was held in 1978. The event quickly became larger than nationals, forcing competition to be split by divisions over two weekends.

Stu, who was MLAG director through the 1980s, takes pride in the fact that the league became a melting pot of suburban, urban, and rural students.

It was revolutionary what we were doing - mixing kids of different races, ethnicity, and sociological backgrounds.

During the decades, numerous MLAG alumni attending Michigan "paid it forward" by coaching in the Ann Arbor schools. Stu mentored many of them, including two of his former students, Mike Steigerwald and Eric Nelson.

Part II next month: Nationals involvement and the formation of AGLOA

Down Memory Lane

Strange Bedfellows was a Language Arts game played in conjunction with Propaganda until the late 1980s.

• The game resulted from a collaboration between two men with the last name of Allen who were not related.
  • Robert Allen was the founder of the National Academic Games Project and the co-creator (with actor Lorne Greene) of the Propaganda game.
  • Steve Allen was a composer, writer, comedian, and TV producer best known as the creator and original host of The Tonight Show.
• Steve Allen wrote this in 1986 about the origin of the game.

I'm concerned about the relative inability to reason in modern society. ... "Meeting of Minds" [a TV show he produced and hosted] grows out of that concern. So does a table game I created, "Strange Bedfellows," the point of which is to encourage people to respond to statements on the basis of their meaning and merits and not on the basis of their source. A professional educator and games theorist, Robert Allen, got in touch with me after he noticed something in a couple of my books, in which I did something like this: I said to the reader, "Let me give you here a couple of instances of blatant Communist propaganda," and then I quoted a couple of paragraphs that did indeed sound like that. Later I revealed that the author of the first paragraph was Abraham Lincoln, and the author of the second was Pope Pius XII. Robert Allen said that something important was done here, and we got together and made a game out of it.

• Strange Bedfellows required players to identity the political system or religion referred to in a passage or the famous person described or quoted in the example.

With that background you can appreciate a story that Stu White shares from one of the National Tournaments at Rock Eagle 4-H Center in Eatonton GA.

• Bob Allen was on stage at the auditorium reading the Strange Bedfellows questions to the players sitting in the theater seats.
• Stu and his pal Jim Davis (Pittsburgh PA) roamed backstage looking for props for their final night skit for the teachers that imitated Johnny Carson's Carnac the Magnificent character.
• They came upon a large cross, perhaps 30' high. So they hooked a rope to the top of the cross and waited for Bob to read a Religion question.
• As Bob gave the answer as Christianity, Stu opened the curtain while Jim pulled on the rope and dipped the cross forward toward the audience. Then Jim pulled it back, and Stu closed the curtains again.
• The students laughed as Bob tried to figure out what caused their mirth.

 
Talmadge Auditorium at Rock Eagle 4-H Center (GA)