As promised from last week, my notes from reading Nils van der Poel’s How to Skate a 10k:
Let’s start with the first obvious point. How to Skate a 10k is not something applicable to the original challenge of our book, long distance speed skating is nothing like quiz bowl. And as it says in its first page “It is not something juniors should attend with.” So this isn’t a thing to apply to your first week. But there are general ideas about habit, training, and development which are more generally applicable than specific to skating. So let’s take the pieces that I noted which are applicable to us. Assuming “us” is you and your team after the television match, and the time to the next event has stretched out in front of us.
1) Establish a routine, and keep it simple. The simpler your process the better your process, cheap and reliable often beats fancy and extraordinary. You don’t need a buzzer system for your team, you don’t need more practice material than you can consume in practices.
2) Establish a routine, with rests in it, and honor both the routine and the rests in it. I’ll freely admit I was never good at this, and lots of quiz bowl players are really bad at this. Given the availability of questions, there’s a significant fraction of quiz bowl players who will play until they exhaust the moderator, the packets, and their supply of opponents. And then they wake up the next morning, and feel like crap going into their first match. It is something I learned the hard way after getting sick and having to work through physical therapy. The rests are there for a reason, and just because you can’t feel like your mind is strained, you can leave yourself overstressed.
3) Traveling is not routine. This was probably the most point which was most revelatory to me. You have to realize that competition breaks the whatever routines you have established, and those disruptions will manifest themselves in performance issues. You can do something with seeing the nervousness before competition, the raised tension and emotions as the product of routines disrupted, and work to remove those.
4) Reduce the challenge to as few fundamental steps as possible. Teaching everything that can show up in quiz bowl is an impossible task, but you can both break it up into categories of information, performance challenges (e.g. we will always have a guess for whatever question presented,) or technical challenges (writing questions, or practicing series of flash cards.) Finding a challenge that can be repeated and works for a player helps them to build themselves up in a way that is less daunting, and more approachable.
5) “True self confidence comes from experience.” This little point here manifests itself in quiz bowl in metacognition, knowing what you know and knowing what you don’t and being able to differentiate between the two quickly. It’s one of the many hidden reasons that a team in their first week is at such a disadvantage in televised quiz bowl.
6) Document your process and use the documentation to hone the process. I’ve asked you to chart rounds, to keep score of your matches, for your team to write down the questions they missed. All that data gives you patterns, patterns of your team’s progress, and what your team still needs to work on. Are there categories of information associated with your wrong answers? Are they the result of overconfidence in what you think you know? Is your team getting better at categories as they go?
There was also a quote which I recognized the spirit of, but I’ve sort of rejected as only somewhat appropriate to quiz bowl: “All the force that went downwards was a waste of energy that didn’t bring me faster forward.”
My version of this has been: Everything orthogonal to what you want to progress towards is wasted effort. But I want to take this point apart for quiz bowl because it’s both true and not true.
That “everything orthogonal” piece covers a multitude of sins. It can be clues that use wordplay, to entire categories, to questions that ask you to manipulate information based on a relationship and put it in order.
What does this mean for televised quiz bowl? It means that you may pick up information that isn't going to help you. The question you need to ask is "how are they going to approach your category?" For instance, you should not ask “Are they going to ask about classical music?” you should ask “how can they approach classical music in a question.” If they don't have the ability to play music during the question, they can ask about the music itself. So how did they approach it? They would use pictures and or include anecdotes about the music, and the title and the composer. A question about Handel's Royal Fireworks Music might give you a painting of the performance, a barge on the river with fireworks above it.
Thinking back, I believe I learned classical music in the perfect way for quiz bowl. My father, who celebrates his 85th birthday today, loves classical music; when I was young, he often spent evenings in the basement listening to classical music over huge speakers which broadcast it to all sections of the house. As a young child, I heard the music even as I was going to bed and often afterwards. While I was exposed to the music, and got a feeling for all of the famous pieces, I had no idea what the titles were, or who the composers were, except that their names were on the spines of the box sets, but I had no idea whose music was which. What was in the music was completely orthogonal to what I needed to know to answer a question.
This would have served me well in television quiz bowl, because there’s not much asked about classical music, and there’s almost no identification required. Once I got to college, I did learn more about the music and the musicians, but my brain never really put the two sets of data together. Does that diminish my appreciation of the music? Not really, I just can’t ask for something in particular to be played.
Now the reason that’s not true is this: “what you want to progress towards” is not an absolute, nor is it timeless. It can change for you personally, and it can change as you go through quiz bowl. For a player to be able to know with absolute certainty what they will want now and forever is hubris. That metacognition I mentioned above is the product of experience, and unless you get exposed to lots of orthogonal information, you don’t know what you need to know for some future competition. As a coach, you have to give your team exposure to lots of things that may not show up in the next competition match, but may have them wondering about entirely new subjects.
Today I’m at the point where I can’t use the things I collect under “everything orthogonal” but I at least appreciate that while those things don’t help me, they are there to help somebody. As a coach, you will have to get to that point, too.
I’ve continued my streaks on Wordle and Dordle, and the whole 2^n Wordle family. As I’ve seen people post their results, I am struck by the possibility that I’m playing these games with a different goal than other people. When I see someone hit in two words, I see it as blind luck, but not an especially skillful outcome. Your first word was close today. In contrast, I’m simply playing defensively to get the answer before I run out of guesses. For these I’ve fallen into a habit of using the same THREE words to start, which cover the 15 most common letters in several five-letter word lists, and position those letters as to put those in the most likely position to be a green letter. This puts me on a lot of 4’s but only two 6’s thus far, and those have been where I’ve gotten 4/5 green and been trapped where there’s three possiblities, and I’ve just picked wrong, like Absurdle took over.
This three guess strategy manifested itself in a different way to play any of the large multiple word Wordles. I’ve been doing this mostly with sedecordle, which is 16 games of Wordle at the same time. You have 21 guesses, but I play it this way:
My first three guesses cover the 15 letters. My win condition is then that each guess from 4 to 19 must solve one word in the set. If I miss getting a word on every step, I lose.
This is to me almost like a runout in billiards. I have to start from the break, and choose each next word carefully, both to take out a word and to eliminate positions of letters in other words. I haven’t succeeded with the daily yet, but here’s a free game that worked.
06-18 CHART – MOWER
05-17 TAUNT – WHOSE
04-16 TILDE – AGLOW
07-14 STUNT – GRATE
09-08 LIGHT – SCOUT
13-12 SPOOK - GLOOM
15-19 EBONY – DETOX
11-10 AMONG - STRUT
sedecordle.com
#sedecordle
You can see how I worked it, my first word had a T last, so when it was green again for word 4, I knew 5 had a doubled letter, which lit up word 7 so I could figure it out. Similarly, figuring out O was doubled fixed 12 and 13, and 13 allowed me to eliminate K from the remaining words.
This is pretty far removed from Wordle, but it does create a couple of interesting ways to train your brain to probe multiple problems efficiently. I don’t know if it constitutes fun, but it’s a sufficiently different challenge that has kept my interest.
Sometimes in quiz bowl practice, it’s valuable to play the game with a different meaning of success or failure, or with normal methods suspended. Whether that’s ideas like players can only buzz in on power (to handicap more experienced players), or only at the end of the question (to make sure clues are heard), or every third word is not read (makes both player and reader pay attention), getting out of the single head space can be valuable.
Does this conflict with my analysis of How to Skate a 10k above? Yeah, but not everything suggested in the book will work equally well for all players and teams. Best to have as many options as possible.