Week 161: The Madonna Through-point
On index cards, big fat meatballs of clues, and how similarity breeds an earlier clue.
Two lines of thought crossed this week.
The first of these was my needing to complete the thought I had with Italian Renaissance painting, which started when I gave the team a guide to the Turtle namesakes. I had made a list of the non-Turtle painters of the Italian Renaissance, and was beginning to put together a PowerPoint of their paintings and some notes. In doing that I noticed a pattern in answer lines that I had failed to consider previously.
One of my past efforts in writing training material down was a series of index cards. The index cards cover a smaller topic than a worksheet, or a mind map, or even the shots and were written for the college teams. Most of the cards that were written are just tables of information that I wanted to 'complete the collection' so I had them written somewhere. So there's an index card in the collection for the Madonna paintings of various artists.
When I drew these two lines together, I realized this was a situational problem, there's a number of clues over a number of answers, which all have the same beginning syllables: "Madonna of” or “Madonna with." Because of this structure, it's not something that can be like a second Swiss sanitarium. It cannot be attacked with one of these being something that will appear in high school and then others are acquired at higher levels. Nor can it be simply ignored, and considered with some, but not all the common answers, because it might be used as an early clue to differentiate a common answer. If you teach only some of the common clues to start "Madonna of," you risk the player jumping on that part of the clue alone. So you have to take the whole thing together to prevent the possible neg.
It's also unusual in that using a Madonna painting as a clue gives such a long lead time to the player. Because there is a four syllable lead time, “Ma-don-na-of,” that points to a uniquely identifying clue, it does flash a signal to the player that you should be jumping on that fifth syllable that comes out of the moderator's mouth. It's a lot longer signal than one usually gets for such clues, and it's something an experienced player will see and focus their mind to what comes next. In baseball, this would be the equivalent of a slow meatball of a pitch coming across the plate, begging the batter to get the timing right and drive it. You don't see it that often in quiz bowl, but when you do see it, you know it’s an instructive example that you should put forward.
There’s also a more general case to draw from this data of the non-turtle Renaissance artists. For the artists I was covering in this study guide, the most notable title which slides into slot of the last clue, were wildly different titles, while there were lots of common subjects or titles between them which weren’t as widely known in quiz bowl circles. Writers ideally want that last clue to be not only uniquely identifying, but to avoid the possibility of confusion. Typically for quiz bowl, the most notable work of an artist is very distinct in name from other works by other artists, and so slides to the last clue, while titles that are very similar but not exact matches appear earlier in the question. This is kind of painful to the inexperienced player, since this does invite a player who only has a few of the subjects mastered to get tripped up. This also means that there’s really only one “Madonna” title that finds itself as a last clue, Madonna with the Long Neck, and that’s because while the other possible last clue for Parmigianino is that he was a Mannerist, he’s not the only Mannerist, so the clue can’t stand alone.
The example I was about to cite was The Tribute Money by Masaccio, which falls to the last clue in pretty much any question I’ve found about the artist. In doing the research, I discovered an interesting fact: Titian also painted on the subject a painting which is called The Tribute Money in English but has a different name in Italian, but I can’t easily find any reference to it in packets. In cases like this, where there is an identical title the writer employs one of three options: the title is given in the artist’s native language, especially if it’s a different language from the more famous version, it’s not mentioned in quiz bowl at all, or it’s given a wide berth by awkwardly prefacing the mention with the more famous artwork (“He’s not Masaccio, but he painted The Tribute Money…”)
I had mentioned last week that I had some thoughts on continuity but I wanted to check if I had already stated the ideas in previous editions of this. Most of it was already stated, but the one piece I would consider a new idea on the subject was this: Consider that everyone who graduates from your program is a resource not only for your team, but for yourself. If you keep contact with your players, they may find articles of interest and send them back to you. They may come back on those weekends when you need them to help host a tournament. They may come back and show your team what they’ve learned in college, and they may even help keep your program alive after you.
This week was spring break/Holy Week for the school, so there was no practice, allowing me to catch up on the selection of study guides and practice questions loaded into flashcard apps. I’ve had to spend a good bit of time learning the export and import practices of Anki and Quizlet, the former being what I started with this year, and the latter being what the school has built up as best practice for them.
Since these are designed to mimic questions on television, I’ve been writing them much shorter and filling categories from single sources as I go. I’m realizing I’m going to have to have around 2,000 of these questions written in time for the summer, and while that seems daunting, it’s quite possible as long as I remember to focus on the types of answers that will be asked on the program. It’s also why I’m cutting this short this week. I wanted to get some of these into the system in time for the first day of class, and I’m already late.