Week 142: Fourth practice reviewed
Saturday 10am, Be there, aloha.
[Possibly a short one this week. My head is full of snot and I need to get clean for tomorrow and Saturday, so off to bed with me when I’m done.]
The fourth and final practice before their first tournament went well. I covered the pieces I wanted to, which I am listing below.
1) Having taken the pre-mortem of the team last week, I put each of those notes to the team themselves. I offered them each a way to improve themselves in the tournament by remembering one thing to change in their strategy.
- To recognize that if you're using the final clue of the tossup as confirmation of your answer, you should just jump on the confirming clue, and beat all the other teams that are going to guess at the end. You are increasing the risk to your team, but its so small at that point, while the benefit is so large.
- To recognize that if you have even a partial answer on a bonus, on the tip of your tongue suggest it to your teammates. Never be afraid to suggest an answer on a bonus.
- To know how long the tossup is going to be, and that you don't have to jump on the first clue, you can still wait for confirmation and beat your opponents to the punch.
- To remember that the captain has to assemble an answer from what their teammates say, and that their teammates are obliged to give their guesses, and if they're not sure, let their tone tell the captain that.
2) I walked them through bonus construction, the simplest lesson. During the raiding of my aunt's bookshelves, I found a copy of ~The Little Prince~, which I have to assume was purchased at one point as a gift for a child in the family. I wrote a simple bonus from the opening pages, and printed copies for each player:
One anecdote in this book is about an astronomer in Turkish dress whose discovery of asteroid B-612 is not taken seriously. For 10 points each--
A. Name this French children's book describing a stranded pilot's encounter with that asteroid's resident.
answer: Le _petit prince_ or The _Little Prince_
B. This author of ~The Little Prince~ based the book on a plane crash he sufferend in the Sahara.
answer: Antoine de _Saint-Exupery_
C. The astronomer is taken seriously ten years later after this Turkish ruler forced Western dress on his population.
answer: Mustafa Kemal _Atat\:urk_
What I wanted to do with this is teach a quick lesson about time. Once you know the first question is about a book, it's highly likely the second part of a high school bonus question will be about the author, and the third question will either be about a detail of the work, or another work by the same author. Questions have blocks of information that the writer puts together all the time. Book-Author-Detail or Book-Author-Book2, CapitalCity-Nation-Detail, Character-Film-Detail. Those first two parts are often constructed along simple templates, and point to a limited selection of answers that the third part of the bonus can be.
So if you know this is running along a controlled path, you as the player have some idea of where part B and part C will be, when part A is read.
So why do players stop thinking when they have the answer to part A?
Part B is something you can probably guess where it's going, and you have the time left from part A and all of part B to figure it out. And that should be the easiest connection to make. Part C could go a few more directions, but you now have all of the time left of part A, B and C to figure out where it's going.
I made this point in the first book, but when you're doing introductory level high school questions the blocks that make up questions are prominent, and you can instill in your newest players a good habit that more experienced teams need to backtrack to exploit.
Ask in practice after part A: "Okay, do you know where this is going?" and show them the block that the two questions form.
3) I walked them through scorekeeping, though probably not enough. More than anything I wanted them to have a scoresheet so that they could have somewhere to write down the questions they missed, scratch paper for computation, and to have something to fix their gaze if they need that to focus. Ideally, I'd like to see the scoresheets of all their rounds because I will be able to extract what they don't know from those results, and apply that to materials to create for study. But because the records will be on spreadsheets, I don't need a copy from them just yet, and they didn't pick one person to scorekeep, so I don't know how well they'll do with it the first time. But by giving them something to keep them in the game (they have to follow the other team's bonus, etc.) it encourages them to stay engaged throughout the match.
I'm actually wondering if teams might benefit from a scoresheet that is the same detail for their team, but much less detail on the other side, like grouping the individual results of the opponent's team into one tossup column, removing the bonus part total, and generally compressing data. This would have to have open space to describe the tossup and bonus questions for each cycle, and allow the team to see what sort of questions were actually asked, giving teams a better feel of what they know and what they don't, and of how the distribution is covered by their team. I may have to play with this notion, but not this week.
4) I walked them through Kidder's Law. No shame, only points. I worked them through the three parts that underlie that.
- How you learned something doesn't matter, what matters is that you have learned it.
- Your knowledge, whether obtained by schoolwork, old packets, independent discovery, or inadvertent exposure, is all valid.
- No one can devalue the knowledge you have, and you will find a use for it.
5) I walked them through Charlie's Rules, because they have to enjoy this, otherwise it's not worth doing.
The other thing I gained from The Little Prince this week was this passage:
If I have told you these details about the asteroid, and made a note of its number for you, it is on no account of the grown-ups and their ways. Grown-ups love figures, when you tell them that you have made a new friend they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you "What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies?" Instead they demand: "How old is he? How many brothers has he? How much money does his father make?" Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about them.
I suspect, but cannot prove, that Antoine de Saint-Exupery had the priorities in his mind clear such that he would have balled out at quiz bowl.
Having given the team four practices, I'm reflecting on the fact that at this point in the book to be, I'd be sending them off to the TV station. And I'm now seeing exactly how little you could do in a week, even if everything goes right. I've made the point in the book that while this is the best chance I can offer to a team, it's still a frustrating possibility, and in no way a certainty. Well, yeah, you can say that, but when you're on the diving board, you're still going to be nervous. I think my team's going to do all right, but I probably won't see any of it, as I'll be reading in the other bracket, and I get to have something to do with my hands. The stakes here are lower, the challenge longer, and the game a little more personal because I've had a month instead of a week.
One of the things I asked about writing this newsletter is when does it end? The rule I'd stuck to is "until it's back to normal." Well, I've managed to keep that regular pace for 142 weeks, and taking a team to their first tournament, in person, is about as back to normal as you can get. That may mean I may not make next Wednesday. I've been thinking about shifting the publishing day around for months, rather than typing my last paragraph after rushing back from CMU's practice. But if Wednesday’s not going to happen next week, it will be because Catie powered something and I had to brag on Saturday. Probably some trash question that offended someone’s sensibilities in being asked, she is my kid by temperament, if not by birth.