Week 152: Questions in a Scrambled State
Name a... drills revisited
I'm pleased with myself this week because I managed to combine a lot of disparate lessons in the practice that I needed to get to before their first tournament (February 18 and approaching fast.)
I used a nominally kids game based on a children's book: The Scrambled States of America Game. We got this as a Christmas gift this year and we tried with the family out on the coldest night of the year so far. When we played it, I recognized a couple things that might help us in practice. First, the game has a a format like slap bowl. The first person to put their hand on a correct state card and say the state’s name scores the card. Second, it's based on recalling only three pieces of information for each state: name, capital, and nickname. In most cases, those pieces of information were already given to students in grade school. So we're talking about information that's somewhat in their memory now. I wanted this to test a lot of things, but the one thing I wanted to remove from the problem was whether or not they knew the answer.
Initially the game comes with state cards, which have the information and a cartoon drawing of the state, and the category cards, which ask for an identifying characteristic of the state. Some of these are game-specific, useless for quiz bowl purposes (match the color of the state in the included map, etc.,) so I pulled those out. I also took the state cards away, after having put all the information of the cards on a single sheet of paper. The players had the sheet in front of them for the first go-round with the category cards, and when we do a second go-round next week the sheet won’t be there. I tried to do this as quickly as possible, with only one or two stops through the fifty or so cards.
Notice, in the description, that I said "their hand on A correct state card." The cards which you're asked to match may have multiple answers. This is a form of the goalie drills I mentioned in week 89.
Setting it up this way reinforces a lot of things I’ve brought up here. Your answer in this game is always the state. So you're crushed down to a multiple choice selection. You’re getting repeated exposure to things that will be last clues, which will come up; and for you to do well with these last clues, you need to recognize they are supposed to be clues and instinctively react to their appearance. If I’ve done this right, all the aspects of best quiz bowl procedure are being exercised with knowledge they should already have. If you mastered a video game, and still enjoyed playing it, you’d try to turn it into a speedrun. If you knew all the clues in quiz bowl, you’d try to do it as quickly as possible, because that would lock out your opponents. If I reduce the set of clues to as small as possible that you knew everything in advance, you’d start to increase the speed.
So what does this do in lessons, that I hadn’t touched yet?
Teaching them to react
One of the things you have to teach eventually is to simply react to the question and you need to just buzz and answer. Clues can always come up faster than you expect, especially when you're getting started in quiz bowl.
Teaching them the basic rules and reinforcing them repeatedly
Sometimes in practice they miss the rules, buzz on tossup, don’t on bonus. This is just repeatedly forcing them to follow the rule that requires them to be aggressive, and will penalize them if not followed. I held them to the rules in a speed run because they need to be able to execute, and if they can learn how to follow the rules quickly, they can follow the rules at all speeds.
Teaching them to not get flustered and to always forget the last question.
I didn't have to teach this lesson this time, but if you see someone on the team get burnt by a question, watch how they react to the next question and the next after that. If they're dwelling on it, sometimes the best solution is to keep firing questions at them. Afterwards explain why you’re not slowing down: because the match won’t slow down. Any mistake that happens in quiz bowl ends with that question, and if your focus is on that previous question, you’ll miss the next one. It’s a little rough, but it’s a lesson to apply to more than quiz bowl.
Teaching them to operate at speed
I want them to be faster on their actions and decisions, but I’m not good at a drill-sergeant approach to coaching. My teaching philosophy tends to be “make all the mistakes you want once, make all the interesting mistakes you want, but the same mistake twice is boring.” This is fine, but it relies on the individual’s motivation to get the most of it. Speed running through this and forcing it through a rigid framework is how I fake the drill-sergeant approach. But it isn’t something I can keep up for long, so I want to get the most data out of this that I can. Part of that data comes from repetition of subject material, but part of that is how comfortable they feel playing at that speed. Not all formats run on a clock, but all formats have timing rules. Saying you don’t run on a clock just means you’re not being honest with yourself. You need to know how your team runs when pressured, and what their top operating speed is. They need to know how fast they can operate in a short burst for conferring on bonuses, or in non-verbally conferring in those three seconds at the end of a tossup.
Body position, and preparedness.
At one point in reading through the cards, I paused and asked them to look at how they were sitting. Because they were paying attention and trying to stay connected to the game, they leaned forward and held tight to the buzzer, their heads were locked on to my words, and then they swept down to the sheet with possible answers. All of these were good things, but they could be better. If they can listen to me, they don’t really need to look at me, it would be better if they looked at the possible answers, or if they looked as something still they could focus on just the words coming to their ears. Leaning towards into buzzer means their reaction is to attack, and that means they’ll have less motion in their buzz, which is incrementally faster.
Changing focus at the right time.
This first time through this, I gave them a table of information rather than have them work through the state information on 50 different small cards. I did this because I wanted to see whether they trusted their own knowledge over something in front of them. The trick here is that it probably takes longer to look down and confirm an answer than it is to trust your mind to come up with the answer and go on guts.
The second time through these cards will be next week, and I’ll ask them to put the paper away after ten or so cards. I want to see what happens when the information has to come from memory. Every one of these questions will have been asked before, they have an answer they used to move through them before. Then for the last ten, I’ll allow them to have the sheet back face up.
At a certain point, alternating with having the source in front of them and not having the information in front of them should result in them not looking at the source, once they realize the information’s not going to be there all the time, and if you have the knowledge in your head, you should just use it.
We’ll see if the lesson can be learned.
Hands drill
This is also a hands drill. In football terms, a hands drill is about making sure your hands are where they should be to receive the ball. In quiz bowl, your hands should be in maybe two positions, one wrapped around a buzzer, the other holding a pencil over paper. That’s it. Now I had the issue of keeping the phone in one hand with one player, and the others were prone to move away from the buzzer after questions, increasing their reaction time to questions. If we can get them to realize how much faster positioning your hands can be, they’ll be able to outgun their opponents. Every little bit of that helps.
Small note from practice for a college team: I never cease to wonder at how people describe clues in a question that they have just heard as “first-line” or “second-line,” given they are hearing the question, and just assuming that one sentence of a question is perfectly equivalent to a line.