Week 118: Summer begins
Revisting quiz bowl vs debate, some odds and ends and a clear path to a milestone.
A couple of notes from last week:
Extending where I put that there’s more failure in quiz bowl than in debate, I think I underestimated the total amount of raw failure that is produced in a quiz bowl match. If you think about every -5, every zero, and if you’re a stickler for perfection everything that isn’t power, there abundantly more failure in quiz bowl. But in summing that up, its sheer amount, and the fact that it passes by so quickly and unregarded, diminishes the failure. It breaks the failure into manageable, ignorable pieces. While failure in quiz bowl can humble the perfectionist, it also deadens the pain of those who start sensitive to it.
When I visited Joe Wright when he was working in LA, he mentioned how intertwined the entertainment industry was with the city, how it was an industry town. He started saying “the entertainment industry is like oxygen around here.”
I thought about as he drove, seeing the tensions in the area at that time and said “It’s keeping the whole thing from burning down. It’s more like nitrogen.”
He said “If I write a book about here, I’m stealing that.” Fine, but it’s been twenty years, and I might use it for a chapter.
Failure in quiz bowl is a little like the nitrogen, keeping the whole situation from igniting. There’s a lot of other things that could use that sort of use of failure.
The other component from last weeks comparison of quiz bowl and debate that might contribute to the nitrogen levels is the quiz bowl remains an actual team competition. Bonus questions, unlinked from their tossup, and requiring the team to shift the burden from player to player as the subject changes, means each player could be called upon at any point in the game. The fact that something the player has learned could come up, something part of their past experience and free from their areas of specialty, means anyone can contribute at any time. And that a failure due to something the team doesn’t know is the combined failure of the team means you cannot hang a loss on one player. That’s a much broader team dynamic than debate, and it’s a lot more quantifiable in quiz bowl, and gives players and teams a direct and concrete path to improvement.
[A couple more small sections of the book this week. I’m finding things are getting close to complete on the first section of the book. That’s not to say I’ve only got that part complete, but it’s the section that needs to be concise, and flow rapidly. It’s the part I’m most worried about, and that I can see the end in sight there means it’s close. The first bit comes from the section explaining what can’t be asked about, and covers two common substitutions writers use. The second is from much later in the book, and covers what you can do to integrate members of the team into the management of tasks.]
Subject versus History of Subject
If you cannot ask about a subject itself, there is one substitute possible over not asking about it at all; that is to ask about the history of the subject. For example, while the possibility exists to ask about the mechanics of journalism, one cannot really use the mechanics of journalism to phrase a question about it. The process of journalism would require questions to begin “how” or “why”, and these questions do not produce well-formed answers which can be easily adjudicated. The replacement for this becomes asking questions about the historical products of journalism, famous journalists and the stories they wrote to cover events. For any subject written about in quiz bowl, some amount of it is the history of the subject, to cover what cannot be written about.
Vocabulary versus Process
Another variation on the impossibility of asking “how” or “why” questions comes with how science questions are written. A lot of science is process, you have to understand the process of a phenomenon in the classroom, but when the test of that understanding is done, you have questions that ask the student to identify the name of the process or step, or there are short answer or essay questions asking to explain the step. The former are really vocabulary questions, the latter can’t be asked in that open-ended form in a competition. If you teach that there’s only one direction this information can flow, and only one answer this information can point toward, you are organizing how they would approach the question on television, and teaching them how the clues should flow in a question.
Am I just a sports coach?
You’re a bit more than that, in that you have responsibilities above and beyond that of a coach until such time as you pass those responsibilities on to other people. For example, you maintain the connection to other teams and organizations. This gives you the jobs of an athletic director. Once you become the team’s contact with the TV station, you are also fulfilling a role of an athletic director, and once you are the contact to your local newspaper, that’s another athletic director role. Add in the job of arranging transportation to matches, and that’s a full plate of just roles fulfilled for teams by an AD. You are applying for money to take teams to events and using fundraisers to get the money you can’t get out of the school board.
The other main position you fulfill for your team is the team equipment manager. You are taking care of the buzzer system (or the instructions to use an online buzzer system,) and getting that buzzer to events. You are taking care of the team archives, and ensuring your team members have access to those archives. You are setting up the practice room and resetting the room after practice. All of these things that help the practice or the events go smoothly are necessary to maintaining a team from week to week and year to year, and cannot be ignored.
The advantage to things in this list is that all of them to one degree or another, can be farmed out to someone on the team, or someone helping you advise the team. You are not the only person who has to do these jobs. Giving some of these tasks to a member of the team is good for you, and gives them specific life skills. Writing the press releases for the team is actually a good job skill, and it is also similar to question writing in that you’re trying to be concise while keeping the reveal of information coherent and retaining the interesting information. If the team knows where the questions are, how to set up the room, and how to set up an online buzzer, you can handle observation of their strengths and weaknesses. A team that can run fundraising and effectively advocate for their own funding in high school will see members that can effectively advocate for their own funding in college.
Finally this week, we’ve been sweating through the whole beginning process of Catie going to high school. The past week she’s joined the band and the volleyball team, and had the first orientation meeting. We’ve been driving her up to mini-camps and practices, and after the orientation meeting, I finally got some clarity on the quiz bowl situation there. The teacher who had last coached a team there (three years ago) left the school this past year, and so there will be a new coach, either a current teacher, a new teacher, or if it comes down to it, me. Meanwhile, my old high school reported that their coach of some dozen years is retiring, meaning as soon as there’s a replacement appointed by the Intermediate Unit, I’ve got some salesmanship to apply. For both of these schools, I’m going to have to help with a plan. Fortunately, I’ve got the summer, and one-third of the process will be ready soon.