Mastering Memory Santa Clarita boy was a finalist for $10,000 memory championship

by | May 20, 2016 | Closeup

 A Santa Clarita fifth-grader recently embarked on a voyage as a national memory master finalist, competing on the open sea.  Local resident Christopher Rodriguez, 11, is one of 16 finalists in the National Memory Master competition.  On May 2, Christopher competed in three rounds of academic memory testing during a five-day cruise to the Bahamas aboard the Carnival cruise ship Victory.  Each of the finalists received two free tickets to the cruise and $800 in traveling money.
The 16 finalists have already been through a rigorous series of local and regional competitions to reach the finals.  Christopher’s presentation to reach this point was a first-person account of European history during the Middle Ages from the perspective of Charlemagne.
The three-round championship will cover disciplines such as math, science, English grammar, history, Latin and geography.
The National Memory Master competition is hosted by Classical Conversations®, a classical education resource used by homeschoolers in all 50 states and 14 foreign countries.  Classical Conversations now has more than 93,000 students enrolled in its tutoring programs.
Christopher attends the Classical Conversations community in Santa Clarita.  He is the son of Howard and Hosanna Rodriguez and the oldest of their four children.  Christopher is finishing his third year as both a Classical Conversations, or CC, student and a Memory Master.
“Christopher is super committed to NMM and loves the challenge,” his mother said.  “Obviously, he is great at memorizing and is an enthusiastic learner.  He is a taskmaster and has successfully learned to set goals by breaking things down into doable daily pieces.”
In his spare time, Christopher enjoys swimming, climbing trees, astronomy club, particle physics, quantum mechanics and reading, especially books by Madeleine L’Engle, Charles Dickens, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, P.G. Wodehouse, Sean Carroll and Andrew Peterson.
For more information, visit www.classicalconversations.com.

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