Paxton’s Collette Lee to appear on ‘Jeopardy!’



PAXTON — While growing up in Paxton, Collette Lee and her three siblings spent plenty of afternoons watching the game show “Jeopardy!” with their parents, Ellen and Tony.

It was on at 4:30 p.m. on weekdays in those days — just in time for the elder Lees to arrive home from their respective jobs as attorneys and for their four kids to settle in after their day at school.

“We were definitely a ‘Jeopardy!’ household growing up,” Collette Lee said. “We’d all watch ‘Jeopardy!’ together and just sort of yell out answers on the couch. … ‘Jeopardy!’ was a big deal in our house.”

Decades later, the show is on television earlier in the day — at 3:30 p.m. — and is no longer hosted by the late Alex Trebek, but little else has changed both with the show and the Lee household. Yes, the kids are all grown now, said Collette, 37, the eldest of the bunch, whose sister Jackie now lives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and whose brothers Nolan and Ian now live in Lafayette, Ind., and Denver, Colo., respectively. Their parents are now grandparents, too.

However, the Lee family is still avidly watching “Jeopardy!” — and that certainly will not change anytime soon. After all, Collette Lee is set to appear as a contestant in the long-running game show in just one week.

Paxton resident Collette Lee, right, poses with “Jeopardy!” host Mayim Bialik. On April 3-4, the Paxton-Buckley-Loda Junior High School seventh-grade math teacher was 2,000 miles from her home at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, Calif., to compete as a contestant in at least one recorded episode of the show — the first of which is set to air at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, June 7, on NBC (Channel 17). (Photo courtesy of Collette Lee’s Facebook page)

On April 3-4, the Paxton-Buckley-Loda Junior High School seventh-grade math teacher was 2,000 miles from her home in Paxton at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, Calif., to compete as a contestant in at least one recorded episode — the first of which is set to air at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, June 7, on NBC (Channel 17). She said she was not permitted to discuss details of the early-April tape dates ahead of her appearance on TV, although she did disclose that the show’s host was Mayim Bialik — as opposed to co-host Ken Jennings — and that announcer Johnny Gilbert mentions her being from Paxton.

“He’s going to say, ‘a middle school math teacher from Paxton, Illinois,’ (when introducing me),” Collette Lee said.

On the June 7 episode, Lee appears with two other contestants, each vying for thousands of dollars in cash — and a chance to advance to the next episode by winning the most money — by putting their trivia knowledge to the test. All three contestants earned the chance to appear on the show after having qualified through a multi-phased testing process.

“It was honestly a dream come true,” Collette Lee said of the experience. “I got to be on my favorite show, so really I felt like a winner before I even stepped on the stage. It’s such a tiny, tiny group of people who get the chance to even play on ‘Jeopardy!’ The people I met on my tape date — my fellow contestants — were just an amazing group of people with just such different life experiences, but you felt like you were in just kind of an elite group. I felt lucky to be there. I felt honored to be there.”

“Jeopardy!” is a quiz competition that reverses the traditional question-and-answer format, meaning that instead of answering questions, contestants are given clues in the form of answers and must identify the person, place, thing or idea that the clue describes, phrasing each response in the form of a question. Contestants must buzz in as quickly as they can to have the chance to provide a correct question, and they win money for each one they get right and lose money each time they are incorrect. The winner of each show is the contestant with the largest one-day earnings, and those earnings then carry over to the next episode until that contestant loses.

Whether Collette Lee ends up advancing past the first episode remains to be seen. While she knows what happens, she is keeping things close to the vest — and watching just like everybody else.

“I am going to have a little watch party with friends, family, colleagues,” she said. I’m looking forward to that. I haven’t decided whether it’ll be public or private, but I work (in the PBL school district) with Katrina Reber, the host up at Artesia Brewing (near Thawville), so we’re going to have it there.”

Undoubtedly, among those watching will be her students, who learned that she would be on the show before the school year concluded last week.

“I didn’t make an announcement or anything, but it definitely made its way through the grapevine at the middle school,” Collette Lee said. “The kids were like: ‘You’re going to be on ‘Jeopardy!’? Miss Lee is going to be on ‘Jeopardy!’ Oh, my gosh, my grandpa watches that all the time!’”

Collette Lee coincidentally has been an avid “Jeopardy!” fan ever since her own days as a student at PBL Junior High School.

“It was just a formative part of sort of my teen years starting in junior high,” she said of the Lee household’s regular afternoon viewings of the show, which usually turned into a competition amongst her parents and siblings. “I would say it was a very competitive situation in my house. It would be hard to say who would take the crown on a given night — it just really depended on the board, depended on the categories — but it was definitely a competitive thing.”

The Lee family is all on the same team now, of course. Ellen Lee, the matriarch, knows just how hard it is to get onto the show, having tested several times to qualify herself, only to not yet be selected.

“Both of my parents were just absolutely thrilled for me,” Collette Lee said. “Mom and I still watch ‘Jeopardy!’ together.”

It was about 20 years ago when Collette Lee began joining her mother in testing to qualify for “Jeopardy!” Several years earlier in the 1990s, Ellen Lee twice tested for the show at in-person testing sites, “but she never quite made it onto the show,” her daughter said.

In-person, paper-based testing was later replaced by online testing, with designated test dates available for each region of the U.S. When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in 2020, the test was made available to take online at any time during the year, instead of on designated dates, just as it still is today.

By the time September 2020 arrived, Collette Lee had taken the 50-question online test several times before. When she took it this time, though, the outcome was different: She qualified for a Round 2 of testing that would occur that October.

“It used to be that they’d make you come to take the (Round 2) test at a physical location, to make sure you weren’t cheating,” Collette Lee said. “During the pandemic, though, they put that (in-person test) online, too. So we had to take the test in a Zoom chat where they were just watching our faces and we were locked to the one screen so you couldn’t open any new tabs (on your computer). They had to be able to see your hands so they knew you didn’t have a phone or anything.”

In May 2021, Collette Lee received a followup email congratulating her on passing the Round 2 test and inviting her to participate in the final part of the ‘Jeopardy!’ audition process — a mock version of the show.

“I was three months postpartum with my second child at that point,” said Collette Lee, who has two kids — Simon, 6, and Stella, 2 — with her husband, Logan Beaver. “I remember being nervous about how I was going to look on camera.”

The mock version of the show was also done online due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“They had you grab a pen to act as your buzzer — your signaling device — and we played ‘Jeopardy!’ on Zoom with actual categories and against other people,” Collette Lee said. “I think it was less about how you did in the game and more about — I don’t know, it was just sort of like a television test, if that makes sense. The categories were noticeably easier stuff than you’d normally see on ‘Jeopardy!’ It was just to see us ring in and what we looked like playing ‘Jeopardy!’, I guess.”

The host of the mock show was Jimmy McGuire of the show’s Clue Crew.

“I was a little bit star-struck,” admitted Collette Lee, a self-proclaimed “‘Jeopardy!’ nerd.”

After competing in the mock game show, Collette Lee waited — and waited some more — to find out if she had been selected to appear on an episode.

“What they tell you is anybody who makes it to the mock game is in the contestant pool,” Collette Lee said. “They say the eligibility for the pool is 18 months, so I put a little reminder in my phone that my pool eligibility would end in November of 2022.”

November 2022 came and went, though, with no news from the show.

“To my knowledge, my pool membership expired, because I didn’t hear anything by Nov. 18,” Collette Lee said. “So I said, ‘I guess I need to go try out again,’ and the very next week I took the anytime test again, and I think I did good, maybe a little better than the previous round when I qualified (in September 2020).”

Then came Jan. 5, 2023, when Collette Lee received a surprise phone call — “the call,” as it is known to “Jeopardy!” contestants — that left her both “delighted and surprised.”

“I got the call (from the show’s producers) that I was one of the people who was going to be selected to be on the show,” she said. “They wanted to check my availability for March and April, is what they said.”

To Collette Lee’s surprise, she was not “out of the pool” as she had originally thought.

“I thought I was out of the pool, but apparently the pool doesn’t really work like that,” she said. “Thinking that my time had expired, I got the call Jan. 5.”

Collette Lee said she was “freaking out” after receiving the news. The producer had called her while she was teaching her math class, so she found out through a voicemail the producer had left.

“When I’m teaching, I don’t normally pick up my phone, so I didn’t pick up the phone when I saw the strange number with a California area code, and I let it go to voicemail,” she said. “And then when I (listened to the message), I got so excited that I accidentally deleted the voicemail. I was very excited that this was actually happening.”

In early April, Collette Lee traveled to California for the show’s taping, accompanied by her mother.

“She got to see it, which I was thrilled for her,” Collette Lee said of her mother. “And now she’s taking the anytime test every year again to see if she can follow me on the show, which I would love to see.”

Collette Lee said her parents have always been supportive of her endeavors, regardless of where in the world they have taken her.

“I just want to give a shout-out to my parents for just always pushing me to be curious and keep reading and learn about the world and embrace opportunities,” she said, “because none of this would have happened for me if it wasn’t for my parents just believing in me through this process.”

A 2003 graduate of Paxton-Buckley-Loda High School, Collette Lee has seen the world in the two decades since. After graduating in 2007 from the University of Illinois with a bachelor’s degree in history with a minor in mathematics, she moved to Chicago for a year before pursuing a master’s degree in elementary education from Roosevelt University in Chicago and graduating in 2009. With the Great Recession in full swing at that time and a lack of available jobs locally, she “looked at some other opportunities” elsewhere, including overseas.

“I saw that you could go be an English teacher in Korea,” she said. “So I did that for three years — from 2010 to 2013. I lived in Changwon, South Korea, teaching English.”

Collette Lee then completed a five-week residential program in Montañita, Ecuador, to earn certification in the teaching of the English language to adults, after which she worked for a year in the country’s capitol of Quito, where she taught English to a “broad range” of people, ranging in age from kids to college students and older adults.

Eventually wanting a change of scenery, Collette Lee then spent two years in the Philippines, including one year in Aklan near Boracay Island and a second year in the capitol of Manila, teaching English through a fellow program that placed her at universities there.

After the birth of her son in the Philippines in 2017, she and her husband moved back to the U.S. To take care of her newborn, she took a year off from work after their move to Paxton, but she eventually returned to the workforce in fall 2018 when she found the job she still has today — as a seventh-grade math teacher at PBL Junior High School.

“I was originally hired to do eighth-grade social studies, which would have been great,” Collette Lee said. “But then they had a resignation in July, so (Principal Josh) Didier asked me to teach math instead. I’ve been teaching it ever since, and I love it.”

Outside of school, Collette Lee enjoys testing her trivia knowledge. She hones her skills on a regular basis as a member of an invitation-only group called the Learned League, whose members take great pride in their depth of knowledge and compete online against each other for bragging rights. Some members happen to be former contestants on “Jeopardy!”

“It’s kind of a proving ground of trivia,” she said. “The people in there take trivia very seriously.”