Yesterday’s lesson to the team was definitional. I covered the idea of Last Clues in a reduced form so I could explain what I mean by Last Clues. I covered the idea of the Identifier in tossups and bonus parts so I could use it in future (while I mentioned it in last week’s training, I figure it could have gotten lost. The third thing that got covered was how best to improve performance on bonus questions. These were given out as handouts, and are copy/pasted here for your benefit. [Commentary on the items is italicized.]
Things About Tossups
The Last Clue
Must be uniquely identifying
Commonly known to enough people that it can be the only part of the question that someone remembers and still be able to answer the question.
Short phrase without curves.
Examples: “capital of Austria”, “the first president of the United States,” “The largest planet in our solar system,” “author of Moby Dick.”
[To explain the importance of those three rules, I gave the team the story of the time “granddaughter of Nobel Prize Winning physicist Max Born” was given as a last clue for Olivia-Newton John, which technically satisfies none of the criteria .]
This is, incidentally, why I've been handing out those maps with national capitals, and playing at the Scrambled States game, because capitals are always last clues.
[After hammering this home with maps and national capitals that I’ve given as handouts, it was edifying to see three last clue capitals given in the two packets we played in practice. Didn’t plan it that way, but it’s cool when the packet makes you look like you planned it.]
If you have an idea about an answer, and you can see that that answer has a last clue you should consider the fact that it has a last clue as mild confirmation of your idea. [I do mean mild here. It’s not enough to fully support jumping in; but if you’re already leaning towards that answer, and your other option doesn’t have a last clue, it’s statistically likely.]
If you can apply this logic to last clues, you can apply this to clues further up the question.
The Identifier
The Identifier is a pronoun or noun phrase (“This…”, “These…”) at the beginning of the question that limits what the answer can be. Every tossup and every bonus part has an identifier.
The answer to the tossup must match with the identifier.
The identifier controls how clues are interpreted. Remember the example of the clue about Pope Francis, if the identifier is something like “this nation” or “this country” it goes to Argentina, but if it asks for this person, it goes to Pope Francis, but if the identifier is “this office,” or “this position,” the answer goes to “the Pope”
Identifiers matter because they signal what type of information will be needed at the end of the question. At the end of the question some combinations of answers are acceptable: Author and work together, for example. You can blitz information in a limited extent. But that’s work you shouldn’t have to do if you remember the identifier.
[Forgot to steal the quote from last week, as it’s quite applicable and much shorter than what I actually said: “you cannot rely on the charity of the moderator.”]
How to attack bonus questions more effectively.
What do we do when we have a little information about the subject, but not enough information to completely answer the bonus?
A bonus question is always multiple questions, and the set of bonus parts all have a theme, which is revealed in the leadin, which is used for all the parts. So at the end of the leadin, we can actually think of answers to questions that COULD BE asked. We could have the answer to part C in our pocket in the first five seconds of the bonus. This is probably the most powerful testing technique quiz bowl can teach, and it’s applicable in every class you’ll ever take. If you can consider all the things that can be asked about something, and you know you can handle all those, whatever will be asked will be a piece of cake. [During the practice, I kept putting the reminder phrase “where is this going?” in between the leadin and part A, to remind them to figure out the pieces that are going to come.]
Everyone on the team, captain and teammates, should keep thinking of answers, even for the parts that they are not facing at the moment.
The team should not give up once they have an answer for a part. We should keep suggesting until they have confidence in their answer. Something we say may spark a teammate’s memory. And once we have a confident answer, we should work on subsequent parts.
We use all the time we have, because we can work on the next part during this part. That means we keep working until the moderator prompts the captain. That means if we still aren’t sure of our answer, but someone has an idea, we designate the person, to get another half-second of think time. [Someone will point out that this is a problem if unchecked, and they would be correct. But for something to go unchecked, it first has to get going. Where the team is right now, getting going is the most important part, and tuning the instinct to designate comes later.]
If we have an answer, that matches the identifier of that part, and we haven’t found a better option, we swing away with that. We never let a bonus part pass without at least trying an answer that matches the identifier.
When a bonus part is completed, we remember what clues and answers were given in that part, because those can be eliminated as possible answers for later parts.
We use whatever equipment we have to keep as many ideas close to us during a bonus. If that means writing down ideas for answers, we write them down. That definitely means writing the theme down in front of us to see where the question is going. Just because a question doesn’t have “Pencil and Paper ready” at its start doesn’t mean we don’t use the tools we have available to us.
In practice try to write down the theme of the bonus, and the answers for parts as they come in. This gives you a record of the question that you can look at afterwards, so you can internalize the sort of clues and answers will be asked the next time this topic comes up. And if you do this during a game, you can do this not just for your bonus questions, but for the other teams’ questions. Writing the clues is a different form of internalization and it helps in a different way from listening to the clues.
If you are a person who can retain information from note-taking, take notes during the match. If you can recall information after seeing notes you took, or someone else took during a match, take notes during the match. If you can remember it from just hearing it, you may not need it, but it’s a good technique to try at least once.
[I’m a fan of the rationale “whatever works for you is the best practice you should follow.” As a player, I was never a big user of notebooks, because I was always able to remember lots of details. However, I was a big user of the margin of a scoresheet to note some things that seemed important enough to remember for next time. While attending practices, I’ve gotten very much in the habit of writing down the question theme that immediately sparks some idea to write a question, and that related idea. A good bit of the first book came from that sort of “yeah, that’s important, check later how important” note. But whatever method you think might encounter, you probably should try it out to see how it works for you, and it’s better to try that in practice than in a live game.]
By the end of the practice, three positive steps were seen. Players were suggesting pieces for part C as part A was happening. The team was giving the full time to bonus parts A and B, and they were just generally converting 30 points at a much higher rate. We’ll see if it keeps up in future practices.
The first book covered a lot of the material about bonus questions above, but it focused on how to do it when you’re aware of all the facts surrounding a bonus theme, and you just need to get them out of your head. This advice is similar but where the former has the assumption that you know you know whatever material you face, this advice can’t assume you know you know. Part of this has to be breaking through a player’s doubt of their own knowledge, and just letting it fly.
One of the things I have been thinking about including in the book is how there are subtle differences in how questions get constructed for circuit quiz bowl, versus other versions of quizzing. I noticed this pattern in reading this article a few months ago. I’m going to ask you to read this and come back here afterward:
https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/35564875/sources-broncos-finalizing-deal-saints-sean-payton
If you’ve never worked at writing for quiz bowl, you probably read through that article pretty cleanly, without interruption. If you’ve written a little, you might have noticed the details in the article that could have been turned into a question later, but you’d have probably read it and then noticed the sidebar and read that. But if you’ve done a lot of writing of questions, once you’d spotted that sidebar, you’d have had a devil of a time not jumping directly to that sidebar, noticing all the information there, and then having a hard time going back into the main article.
I believe that the more work you do to train yourself for quiz bowl, studying material and the like, you end up training your mind to devote attention to information. A sidebar like in that article is not a distraction from the main narrative of the article, but an attraction, and in this case it’s almost like a trap. And this attraction is slightly different if you do other types of quizzing, because in other forms of writing there is a limit to how much of this sidebar can be useful. After writing maybe one question, you would reach a point of information saturation, and can’t do anything more with it.
In making a study guide for the team a couple weeks ago, I described it as what you would get if you curated all the sidebar readings from a particular textbook. In doing so, I realized that I may have put them to the point of saturation with the subject. I still have to calibrate lessons, to not overdo the lesson in one guide.