Week 151: The Seven Wonders of the World
And learning elimination without learning uniquely identifying.
Short one this week, as I’ve had to spend the past two days dealing with three distinct flavors of car trouble across three separate cars. Saturday we noticed the car had one tire slowly going flat, but we thought we had time to fix it, we did not. Sunday we tried to fix that by taking the SUV to get a replacement tire for the car. This led to us stranding the SUV at my parents’ place with a dead battery. Finally we tried to pull the van out from in front of our garage, only to find that with the rain dropping two inches on Sunday morning, if you came off the gravel, you sank into the mud, which the van did nearly up to its axle. So after borrowing a fourth car to get a replacement battery and waiting for the ground to freeze so we can extricate the van, we’re hoping to get back to normal as soon as they get a replacement tire out of back order. This week has had the perverse feeling that I need to get two ducks, a hunter, and two cabbages to the other end of my driveway
I spent a little time this week with one book in my back catalog of sources that doesn’t get used much. The book is What Are the Seven Wonders of the World? and 100 Other Great Cultural Lists - Fully Explicated by Peter D'Epiro and Mary Desmond Pinkowish. There's usually a copy of this residing in your local Half Price Books' "Reference" section, among the books that pretend to ask "Did You Know?" when they deliver information that's more "Do You Care?" I had bought this shortly after it came out, and had kept my copy for a couple decades. During the run up to Christmas I was planning to use it to build out a few study sheets for the high school team, and present them at practice. Sometime after Christmas I realized I had lost the copy, either it had fallen out of my luggage, or I put it in the stack of prizes for the last tournament. So when I had time to kill at Half Price Books this past week, I discovered a copy precisely where I had seen the previous one, and I got to work.
What Are the Seven Wonders of the World? is organized as a set of 101 essays, answering questions that have multiple answers, ranging from 3 to 24, with the number of answers organizing the placement in the book.
As this book was included in the list of reference books on the NAQT site , and it was put on there by multiple writers at the time; I suspect, but cannot prove, that this book was one of the inspirations for the form of You Gotta Know columns. In 1999, when that book list was put on the NAQT site, I know I had suggested it and Rob Hentzel also put in his list. As it is a big pile of organized essays/study guides, it probably had some influence in the writing of The 99 Critical Shots of Quiz Bowl, in rough length, typesetting, and subject matter. I subconsciously avoided most of the topics, we only had collision on the Triumvirates of Ancient Rome and the Mighty Handful of Russian music, and I think those two were unavoidable collisions.
The book has a few problems as a source for quiz bowl study. Its difficulty relative to quiz bowl is all over the map, it's a little too focused on religious questions, and critically too light on uniquely identifying information. By this I mean that almost all the discussions in the essay are designed to first show the membership of answers within the group and then to differentiate the elements of the answers from each other. This is bad if you're looking for first clues to learn, but is excellent for showing you the clues which will work down the decision tree, first to point you to the general class of answer, and then to help you differentiate between the answers.
Let's take an example from the text to show you: Question 40 is "What are the five classical architectural orders?" Now if you started from zero knowledge of the term, or of architecture you'd need some context to place that this essay is actually about columns in ancient architecture. And that's what the essay does at first, walking you through the basic components of columns in architecture, using the keywords that are used to describe them, and a diagram to put them in visual order. In quiz bowl context the first part of this essay is teaching you "How can I identify that a tossup being read to me is about a type of column?" The second part of the essay, and really all the essays, give details for each answer in comparison to the other answers in the set. In this case it teaches "Given this is a question about a column, how do I choose amongst those possible answers?"
So really in terms of tossups, nothing here will teach you to power or first line a tossup, except for the bizarre possibility that the answer is the general class of answers. (e.g. answer: _column_s) But what it will do is fill in the late middle clues in a tossup before the uniquely-identifying last clue. That's not an unreasonable way to learn these subjects, and for quiz bowl teams starting out, it's kind of ideal as the second step after training your new team on a steady diet of uniquely identifying last clues. (Which at ten weeks of practice, is right about where we are.) It does help a great deal with guessing, because you at least learn one member of the class within a fairly limited set of options. But learning all the eliminating clues and learning the class doesn’t anchor your knowledge to a uniquely identifying clue.
So I spent a little time with my new copy, ripping out questions into single page study guides. I'll be including these in the training of the team over the next few weeks, but I do figure it's warping my opinion of acceptable questions I can salt into their practice. While I'd appreciate the audacity of a question where the answer was specifically asking for a region of Italy, had I just read this book; I can't imagine that that would be a majority opinion, or even my opinion had I not glanced over Question 100.
I have a list of the articles I want to convert into guides, either single sheet PDF's or index cards, and I've got seventeen days to put this together before the next tournament. Wish me luck.
As mentioned above we're on course for the tournament at CMU. It's now at 14 teams with a cap of 18, and our registration is complete. It looks like a good mix of teams, some which have already qualified for nationals, and some that haven't been to a tournament in a couple years, and surprisingly, we're not even the only team starting from scratch.
This week’s practice just handled the basics, we needed to process the paperwork for getting the team to the tournament, and I stuck to two very simple sets of last clues: countries and capitals, and the periodic table. I harp on these as key things when you start out as a team, but they really are fundamental for introductory tournaments and especially televised quiz bowl. They are the sort of questions which are most likely to do psychological damage to your team when you miss them, because at a certain point in your experience as a player, you feel you should know them.
We switched into a new tournament this week, having exhausted the first two tournament sets I had read for them. That gave me a chance to push the secret the important knowledge that everything repeats in quiz bowl. I had used the two tournaments to poke at this, matching one question in one tournament set with another question in the next packet read. Now as we went into the third set, I prefaced the packet with this advice.
“We’re now entering a different set of packets, done for a different event in a different year by different writers. So while they are not going to repeat clues inside this new set of questions, they are going to repeat things you have heard in previous packets, because they have no way to prevent their stuff from repeating what you just heard. What that means is you are going to hear things that sound very much like questions you’ve already heard. Everything can repeat. Some of it will this week. Some of it will next week. So if you hear something that sounds familiar, that’s probably because it is familiar. And so you need to rely on your memory of this as much as your knowledge. And when we get to the tournament in two weeks, you need to remember that starts a new set of packets that are free to repeat any the things you’ve heard in practice, and you should act accordingly.”
They’ll get a condensed version of this again in two weeks before the tournament. Hopefully, it makes a difference.