There’s a few things that you can start with at a team’s beginning, that won’t pay real dividends, until a couple of seasons have passed. But the early investment in setting them up will help you for the entire lifespan of your program. One of these is an easily confused list, and the second is a packets read list.
What is an easily confused list?
An easily confused list is a list of anything that is an answer that your team repeatedly gives the same incorrect answer to, and the common incorrect answer. You can expand this to things you see other teams miss repeatedly. If you’re going to do something like this, it’s best to start as soon as you notice this sort of confusion in your team. Something that is easily confused comes up enough for you to notice it, and is usually a pattern common to multiple players, not just one. For those reasons, once you identify a pattern, you’ll see it both with different members of your team, and over time.
Why collect an easily confused list?
You can use such a list to show how common mistakes like this are, and use the entry to highlight to your team that these can be predicted and planned for. Having a list allows you to treat the situation whenever it occurs, and show a series of these confusing cases in context. Not having a list means you're going to improvise when it comes up, and probably forget a few examples.
Do you have an example of an easily confused list?
I have said that I would do this on multiple occasions, and there's notes of four or five in various locations around my laptop and on notepads, but I have never collected everything in one place. Until now. Here’s a list collected from my experience and from those of other players I've seen hit them.
libel – slander
Adsorption-absorption
xylem - phloem
Bosporus-Dardanelles
Oort Cloud – Kuiper Belt
Cape of Good Hope – Cape Horn
Gibbs free energy – Helmholtz free energy
Broca’s area – Wernicke’s area
Creole-pidgin-lingua franca
Paraguay – Uruguay
War of the Spanish Succession – War of the Austrian Succession
Schubert – Schumann
Green’s Theorem – Stokes’ Theorem
Richard Strauss – Johann Strauss
Stark Effect – Zeeman Effect
Phosphorescence – Fluorescence – Luminescence How can we classify things from an easily confused list, and learn from it?
I've grouped them into a few families of how they will occur, and how to address the problems they pose.
Answers that sound or look similar to each other. (Manet-Monet)
This is the most common, is the most likely to be simply a brain fart, and the one that is hardest to wipe away completely. These are easily explained, and the easiest one to identify what went wrong. However these are also the easiest ones for a team to be burnt by when the mistake occurs. The moderator, hearing the answer, will often ask for the player to repeat their answer to confirm they’ve made the mistake.
Answers that relate similar concepts or that were taught concurrently. (xylem-phloem)
These are answers that get taught close to each other, or are contrasted with each other. Basically, if two concepts are introduced in the same section of the same chapter of an introductory textbook in the field, they have the possibility of being easily confused, once the lesson, the chapter review, and the test fades from memory.
The contrast may emerge in the “like [X]” or “unlike [X]” construction in the question. This achieves the removal of the confusion, while providing a clue to the players.
Answers that share a type and specific quiz bowl details. (Typee-Omoo)
This is tricky sometimes because there’s not really an obvious association for new players, there’s just two things that fit a category very closely. One of the most common pairings is Typee and Omoo. Both were narratives of South Pacific voyaging, written by Herman Melville. They show up as clues for Melville because they are short memorable titles, but they’re oddly specific with respect to each other. When used as clues, they do their job very well and point to Melville, it’s when we have to differentiate between the two that we find trouble.
The good thing about this type of mistake is that an experienced question writer will account for this confusion, either by emphasizing particular details of one work that is completely out of character for the other, or by the most blatant of pushes: the phrase “Unlike [X]” or “Like [X]” More often the writer will simply not write for those answers. In early years, writers had a tendency to want to write towards one of these two answers, leaving the other as the trap to the mildly experienced team. Today it’s seen as not really fair play on the writer’s part.
Answers that someone gets stuck on, becomes further confused, and have to unlearn their response.
A very specific case that I ran into during play was that I ended up confusing two Wagner operas that involved singing competitions: Tannhauser and The Meistersingers of Nuremberg. (This would not be a problem today for most people in quiz bowl because both of them are on the far end tail of even Wagner operas, but back then there wasn’t really a tail as a concept, all Wagner operas [and by extension any all items in a sufficiently famous person’s list of works created] were considered fair game.) The reason this became problematic was that I then began to also confuse elements of Tannhauser with elements of a third Wagner opera, Parsifal. In the parlance of my team at the time, not only was I not bringing anything to the table at this point, I was actively taking the table away.
How can we apply an easily confused list in play and practice?
Recognize the pattern in practice when it happens.
This is the comparatively easy part of this. You’re now aware that there is something to watch out for, and hopefully, it’s going to be something where every time it happens in front of you, you’ll remember this and write it down.
Collect the differences between the two answers, and highlight them to the whole team.
Have some document which you compile, accessible to the whole team. I emphasize that you have to make this list for your team. It has to be an organic outgrowth of what your team needs. If you look at a website like https://www.whatsthediff.org/ you can see this immediately, you’d have to search through someone else’s list to find just the things that were confusing to your team.
In the easily confused list, store information which will lead to a differential diagnosis between the two.
Note the clues that apply to one and not the other. Note any websites that highlight the difference between the two answers, like this one https://www.quirkyscience.com/fluorescence-phosphorescence-incandescence/
Make the person who made the mistake recognize the pattern, and the right way to correct it in future.
I don’t mean this to sound confrontational, but you should highlight the pattern here. You won’t have the supporting information to separate the two, but you could put the task to them to show how to separate between the two, and it can become one of their tasks to add to the list, and explain the difference between the two for the list.
Salt a future practice with a question that plays off the confusion.
There’s no reason you can't make note of this confusion in later practices, and there's no reason you can't look ahead and prepare yourself to note it when it happens. If you locate a question about the same subject or the other half of the confusion in a future practice packet, you can highlight the problem again.
Keep salting the practice, and make sure later players see the pattern so they don’t make the same mistake.
There's nothing stopping you from having this be a lesson in future years. Having a list gives you an example to introduce the concept into practice, and a set of points to expand it when it happens.
Teach your new players the confusion pattern, and have them learn the confusion and the differences, and if they don’t have a better answer when one of those is given as an answer and is wrong, to counter with the other part of the pair.
This is especially true for your new and developing players. If they don’t know anything about Manet yet, and they don’t know anything about Monet yet, they should at least know when their opponent negs with one, and they don’t know anything that could be the answer, they should respond with the other half of the confusing pair.
The results of the first practice.
The first practice went well. I changed my plan at the last minute, and printed an even more introductory set of questions than I had planned. I wanted to be absolutely sure there weren’t questions going dead, and it’s always better to miss easy versus miss hard in the first couple practices.
Three of the expected five students attended, the two were attending another club's meeting at the same time. I limited the session to one hour and with the explanations of what quiz bowl is, that left only time for one packet.
So how did they do?
Better than expectations, for three underclassmen without buzzer experience, only one dead tossup in earth science, which none of them had had yet. After the round, I took the notes I wrote in the margin of the paper copy and evaluated their performance and where they will need to go.
How did I do in helping them?
I spent too much time on asides, but I wanted to give them context of the whole year in front of them. I went into the story of the Canonsburg radium site when the Curies were mentioned, and I wouldn’t had both Catie and I driven past it countless times. (That story explained here: https://www.energy.gov/lm/articles/marie-curie-pioneering-physicists-connection-lm) I probably spent too much time using “The Quiz Bowl Experience” and the “Rules of Quiz Bowl” videos, but I think that helped set the idea that they could do this.
I asked the important questions, and challenged them in the positive direction. One of the things I did ask them individually was what they thought they knew and didn't know. And then when questions came up that showed they did know a little bit of something in that category, I gently called them out for doubting themselves. To me this is the best of both worlds, giving them the recognition that they know something, while being able to gauge their doubt in their own ability, so we can work to end that.
What am I doing for the next practice?
I'm looking at how the team did on that packet, and selecting study materials that might help. It's a first cut, and I won't introduce them this week, but I'm going to put it in the folder. Yes, I've started a folder for this. That's how we know it's serious, I'm preparing for it like I won't be able to get WiFi. It's an expandable folder, clear, with a snap on it. It currently holds five packets of questions, my notes of what I want to do for the next four practices, and five scoresheets. The last will be needed to train them to scorekeep before the last practice before the tournament.
From the first packet reading, I think they'll be good on literature, OK on science, and history very variable. This makes sense given that we're dealing with it's a junior and two freshmen, so they're missing the senior year science courses. Geography is probably the quickest way to get both it and history solidified. Fine arts is a bit of a wash, but if they get exposure to some canonical answers, this will fix itself. We'll need more data to refine this, of course, but I think they won't embarrass themselves.
Tactically, we are going to have a major issue with the pause of recognition. The eyes got big and the inhale was huge on a bunch of questions, that’s fixable with practice but it’s slow to fix.. Fortunately they aren't shy, everyone but Catie firstlined a question, and Catie used all the context clues to dig out a question before it got easy.
[For the record: Catie's first answer was on "magnets," managing to infer the answer from the information about force, rather than responding to the classic opening of the Curie temperature. Given that's something you learn much later in high school, if at all, I'll take it. Listening and finding the clues is one thing that helps your team; listening, finding nothing you recognize but still playing your best hunch is a more experienced play.]
After the practice, Catie and I stopped at Sonic, got a treat, and I registered them for the next local tournament, filling the field.
We'll try to promote the team better for next week's meeting, but if it comes to it, we're prepared to go with what we have. We've got four more practices before then, but I think they'll surprise themselves.
After the tournament I wrote a note to myself in a spreadsheet, starting a packets used list. Compared to what’s needed for an easily confused list, a packets used list isn’t a major investment. It’s just a list of which packets you’ve used in a practice, and the date that the packet was read. If you have something like that, and it is available to the whole team and maintained properly, you can use it in a lot of interesting ways that will be useful. First, it can save you a two minute false start in each practice. If the team has read this packet before and the data is not maintained, the first couple questions may get read, and your team will get excited that they know this stuff, only to realize “wait! We did this last week.” Two minutes a practice does add up, and the perpetual overestimation of your own abilities followed by disappointment can grate on your players. The second advantage is that you can share reading duties among many people, and not have the possibility of taking rounds out of order or getting out of sync. The third benefit of this is that if you have highly motivated players who can’t attend every practice, they will know that they can tackle what they missed on their own, without getting ahead of the team. Finally, you can work out a yearly schedule for particularly useful packets or theme packets.