When October begins, I go looking for a pumpkin. Not just any pumpkin. It must be a big specimen, a handsome one. It must be worthy of being called “a great pumpkin.”
I’m a school librarian, and I’ve been holding annual “great pumpkin” contests for close to 30 years. I started in my town’s middle schools, and now organize them for our grades 7-12 school.
They are unfailingly popular.
The contest is a simple one. Pick up the pumpkin and estimate its weight. Write your guess and your name on a slip of paper and put it in the entry box. On a specified date, the librarians will determine who has come the closest to the correct weight. That person wins the pumpkin.
Only once have we had a tie. I went out and bought a second pumpkin.
There is no denying the attraction of a large pumpkin. This year’s prize weighed over 30 pounds. It was not porch material. I couldn’t even see anybody putting it in their front yard unless they lived at the end of a long, secluded driveway. Evil passersby would be tempted to smash it, and the resulting mess would be horrific.
I could see this pumpkin in a backyard, on a tree stump or a boulder. It needed space and security.
I had to bring a library cart out to my car to transport the pumpkin into the building. It was lunchtime, and I had to pass through the food court. I drew many curious stares. One of our library “regulars” ran up to me. “If I brought a scale in and weighed it, but you didn’t know, would that be cheating?”
“Yes,” I said.
This was a high school student. When the middle school was merged with the secondary level in 2009, I wasn’t sure if the pumpkin contest would interest the older students. But I was bound and determined to carry on the tradition. It turns out that everybody loves a big pumpkin. Everybody wants to own a big pumpkin. It makes no difference whether you are 12 or 18, or an adult. We don’t let staff compete but they express admiration for the pumpkin, too.
I’m not sure everyone realizes that even the biggest pumpkins only cost $5 or $6. It’s really not a major outlay. You, too, can put a big pumpkin somewhere in your yard.
So, perhaps, the excitement is in the winning. In being right. In nailing it. That has happened once or twice—that is, a student has submitted the exact weight of the pumpkin.
Naturally, we weigh the pumpkin in great secrecy. No student helpers can be involved, as they invariably want to submit a guess. One of the staff (whoever can lift it) takes the pumpkin to the nurse’s office for a visit to the scale. We write the number down and place it in a secret location. Then we set out the pumpkin and the entry box, and wait for the entrants to come. Which they do. Posthaste.
On day one of the contest, the entry box looked full. But it couldn’t have been, because two weeks later, entries were still coming in.
It’s amusing to watch the students try to determine the weight. This year’s pumpkin was truly heavy; I pulled a muscle transferring it from the car to the library cart. But, of course, most students will pick it up, albeit briefly. Once in a while, someone will make a show of measuring circumference and height, as if that is going to help. Then again, I am such a failure at math, I can’t say that with any certainty.
It’s also a slightly scary sight. A seventh-grader, holding a 30-pound pumpkin—that is a recipe for disaster.
But we haven’t lost one due to a drop yet. One year, the pumpkin did start to rot, and I had to replace it.
It takes a certain skill set to make a good guess on the weight of a pumpkin. One teacher, who was just guessing for fun, said she tried to relate it to how it felt to hold her children when they were young.
That’s not something students would do, of course, but I bet the ones who come closest are thinking about the weight of things they’ve held. The family dog, perhaps. High school students may have weighed items in science class or in a trades course in the technical center.
Then there are those who just guess wildly. The estimates ranged from 10 pounds to 50.
There have been times when the winner was a known math whiz, but other winners apparently had hidden talents. Last year, for the first time, we allowed metric estimates. We have students who have emigrated from the Middle East, and they think in kilograms.
One of these students won last year, which isn’t a total surprise, as the metric system is more precise than our standard American method.
The best part of the contest is the awarding of the pumpkin and the announcement of the weight. The winner is always over the moon. There are several days of discussion centering on “I can’t believe it weighed that much!”
The great pumpkin contest is good fun. It brings students together as they lift the pumpkin and ponder its weight. And though we’ve been doing it a long, long time, it never gets old.
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