Hi, all! Here we are, late in the competition and I'm finally poking my head out. I'm Chris Devine, son of the state coordinator, Laurie Devine, though I'm a long-time participant in National History Day, as a student and as a volunteer, organizer and judge.

Yesterday I had my first opportunity to something I was never sure I'd get to do: Judge at the national competition! In my mind this was always one of those things left to the best of the best, the historians who live only in the stale air of the ivory towers of academia and descend to earth only long enough to dispense justice on poor, unsuspecting history students in College Park, Maryland, once a year.

But they apparently thought sufficiently highly of me to ask me to judge senior group documentaries. So I marched down the hill with my backpack, my judging packet and a whole set of fears about the coming day.

I know that compared to the students I had no stress at all, and nothing to worry about. They've done all the hard work, and they're the ones who are about to present the pearls of that labor before us, the swine who get to decide which of them take home medals at the end.

But from my perspective, there's a lot to worry about. First, I don't like dashing anyone's hopes. I'm afraid that I'll miss the point that someone is trying to make and tragically underestimate their entry. On the other hand, I'm afraid I'll miss some glaring historical or factual error and give them a lot more credit than they're due. But worst of all, I'm afraid I'll pierce through that air of omniscience and invincibility that I remember surrounding all the judges I ever had and reveal myself for the normal, fairly bright but far from all-knowing person I am.

I think I got through it OK.

But if you think watching 13 ten-minute documentaries, poring through dozens of pages of bibliographies and trying to come up with a steady stream of new and probing questions to test their knowledge of their topic and find out if they really did use every one of the books listed in their bibliography is easy, let me assure you it's anything but.

The first three entries my group of three judges watched were incredibly good. The research was first-rate, with a lot of in-person interviews and a wide variety of sources. The scripts were well written and logically structured and the video editing and production were far beyond what you'd expect high-schoolers to do. But I remember the days, long before iMovie, when slide shows with cassette-taped narrations were the technology of this category (known as media presentations at the time).

And the students were just as impressive. They were well dressed. They greeted us each individually with a smile and a handshake. And they shared question-answering time with each other, to make it clear that they had all participated in the project; there were no 'free-riders'.

I remember thinking after our third entry of the day that if they were all of the quality, we were in for a tough decision-making process at the end of the day. Fortunately (and unfortunately), the rest were mostly not. They varied widely in quality, but none of the other ten rose to the same level as the others. And a lot of the students seemed reluctant or distracted during their interviews -- one team was even breaking down the equipment they'd brought, disconnecting electronics and winding electrical cords, while trying to answer our questions! They weren't at the top of our list at the end of the day.

As first-round judges, our job was to pick two entries to pass on to the finals round. This was the most difficult task of the day, and required all our skills of diplomacy, persuasion and compromise, since each of the three of us had differing opinions on which the best two were (we agreed on the top three, fortunately, but we each put them in a different order). NHD requires a consensus of all judges, rather than a democratic vote.

So we finally came to an agreement that put my original top choice into third place and my original third-place choice at the top! Ranking the rest of the day's entries was, by comparison, a snap.

Our time deadline was fast approaching ... The kids started gathering in the lobby at around 5:30 to find out which entries qualified for finals, even though they weren't posted until about 7:30. So we weren't able to give as many carefully-considered comments on our judging sheets as I would have liked to. But I think our scoring was fair and our comments appropriate.

The thing to remember for any participant is that there were no bad entries here. They would not have qualified for the national competition if they were. What we were faced with was a startling diversity of topics and varying levels of nearly professional-level expertise. It helped ease my mind during the judging process to realize that no one in that room was a loser. It sounds trite, but it's absolutely true.

Well, there was that one entry that made me wonder ...

But I felt pride for everyone there. And I was glad I was able to take part in such a direct way.

And now, as a supporting member of the Arizona delegation, I sit back and wait for tomorrow's award ceremony and closing celebration! What to do tonight ... what to do while we wait?