Peet freshmen face off each Friday in honors history jeopardy

Colby Grothoff teaches honors 9th grade U.S. history at Peet and has a second hour class and a seventh hour class that each week explores the current events happening around the world. 

Grothoff “sends students a teaser every Wednesday” with GoogleDocs shared with all of his honors students containing key words and events that have happened in the past week that they can research for jeopardy on Friday. 

Students are encouraged to use the teaser and research on news channels and online credible resources throughout the rest of the week. Every Friday the class uses their research from the week to answer questions for Grothoff’s four main categories of jeopardy: U.S., world, sports and entertainment. 

The U.S. category uses events that have happened in the previous week within the 50 states, and students usually have a short answer of the people involved or the location of the event. The world category is essentially the same idea just from countries throughout the world, and students usually name a person or country from the event. Sports and entertainment are very similar just focusing more on sports and television industries rather than general events. 

Ninth grader Kaitlyn Cox said, “We get to work with others in our class, and we can relate our learning back to our current events.” 

Grothoff sorts the class periods into teams each quarter and uses a random group generator at the beginning of each quarter to give students their teams for those eight weeks. Groups usually have four to five students, and they pick their own team names. 

Each week Grothoff has students get in their groups (it is their own job to study) and they play jeopardy by going around the room picking and answering questions to the best of their abilities. 

After the board of categories and their five different questions, there is a miscellaneous category each week. Cox said, “It gives us a chance to look up the news and not only about U.S. or sports but the miscellaneous topic each week.”

The miscellaneous categories have been horror films, Disney, Harry Potter and more. 

Ninth grader Greta Huhn said, “It’s a good brain break since we work so hard all week.” 

Every week in the quarter the teams play jeopardy on Friday and the scores are added up till the last week of the quarter when teams wager as many points as they would like for their last question.