How OzCLO changed my life, Part 2

In 2015, on moving to a new school, I discovered two things very quickly: one, a previous teacher had already done a very good job popularizing OzCLO among the students. Two, there were some genuinely talented young linguists at the school. The most prominent of these was the acknowledged “captain” of a Year 11 team which reached the national round that year, and I again had the pleasure of accompanying one of “my” teams to the tension-filled atmosphere of the competition’s second stage. They came close, but couldn’t quite break into the Bulgaria-bound top two.

The following year, it happened. The same team, now in Year 12, received the news in April that they had gained second place in Australia, and an invitation to the International Linguistics Olympiad (known as the IOL) in Mysore, India.

Preparations for the trip were frantic, and not without a few hiccups (overseas trips for school students generally require a year’s preparation), but sure enough, the team set out for India in July, accompanied by myself and my wonderful colleague Vicki Milne, another language teacher who also developed a taste for linguistics puzzles.

At breakfast with Team “Australia 2” at the International Linguistics Olympiad in Mysore, 2016.

It was an unforgettable experience. The students were able to mix with fellow language hounds from all around the world, from Kazakhstan to Korea. (It says something for their commitment, by the way, that they were so determined to compete in the IOL despite being in the middle of their HSC Trials.) For myself, the week was both thrilling and formative: meeting and learning from the leading lights of the IOL, both the organizers and the linguistic puzzle masters (many of them from Eastern Europe, were linguistics competitions were born) had a profound effect.

Back at home, still buzzing, I mulled over how to build on the success of the school’s 2016 pioneers. And so began my second stint of linguistics study…