I was looking for a force multiplier for the team, that is something to study that would appear in questions at a greater frequency than typical. In doing that, I got to thinking about an old abandoned thought of mine. That if you write a question (or come up with the concept) about a certain subject, and you then struggle with the categorization, you're going to make the categorization fit your needs.
I knew that this was possible because of a conversation I had way at the beginning of quiz bowl web forums, about whether thermodynamics should be considered as a part of the chemistry distribution or the physics distribution. The chemical engineers argued for chemistry, even the physicists leaned toward chemistry, and the non-chemical engineers leaned hard for physics. But it wasn't something that was cut-and-dried, they could see that how it was taught, and in which class it was encountered, colored their categorization. And so while everyone was going to make their own call on how to categorize it, they recognized someone else might categorize it differently. Thermodynamics lay near the edge between the two subjects.
When we look at the edges of whatever distribution is created, we are going to find questions that overlap. These overlaps mean that these questions could be put into the packet from either side of the distribution. That means they're less likely to get crowded out by other questions, and you're slightly more likely to see them appear in packets. So if you can locate subjects on those edges, you can work to study them first.
I'm going to walk you through two cases of edge work. The first relates to the quiz bowl circuit, and the second relates to televised quiz bowl.
After I had done the painters of the Italian Renaissance study guides, I started considering other groups of painters, and I settled on a surprising choice for the next one: the painters of the American Revolution era. My reasoning was that the painters and paintings were a small list, they were known images and often visible, and they often used as subjects people and events that had historical impact, commissioned to commemorate the events and people, and were often themselves answers to questions, or clues to answers. If you know something about the artwork, you know something about the historical context, and so learning about the art meant that it could net knowledge that could appear whether the question started as an art question, or a history question. Working to learn the edge that borders both categories means you can pick up points in either direction, and that means whether the writer chooses to categorize the question as art, history, or mixed category, you're covered. Because it can fill three possible slots, writers could throw it in any of those slots, increasing the chance it gets through.
State quarters were created as an educational improvement, to introduce history and geography to the general population, promoted through the population by making them a series of news stories, and then rejected by those writing history questions who deemed them either current events or general knowledge. (General knowledge sometimes has a stigma on the circuit of knowledge that is held by too many people to generate proper clue ordering. This is as pretentious and wrong-headed as it sounds.) As a result they were smeared all over the distribution for a short period of time, and then when the program ended it passed into obscurity on the circuit.
But for television, the details of what was included in those quarters was still valuable, and because it was presented to the public and remained in their pockets for years afterwards. They became something that a viewer would have that vague inkling of remembering the fact they had seen over and over again. When you have something like that, it also becomes something that sparks the writer over and over again. Because they exist on the edge of a lot of categories, and because their clues slide around those categories, and they have common names for answers and giveaway clues, the information you'd find on state quarters have insinuated themselves into a lot of television questions.
So what are the characteristics of these things that lie on the edges? They typically have common names (both senses of this: commonplace words, and words in common between categories). They are things that people outside of quiz bowl will have heard of. You're not going to see things on the edge be deep jargon specific to a field, and they won't be obscure within either category that they form the border. They often are the result of someone trying to popularize the knowledge, and there may be a sense of promotion behind them. And when they go before the circuit there is often a slight controversy of classification. Whether that takes the form of a push towards one category or away from it, that smeared area is a little more space where that subject and clues can flourish.
In gardening news, I spent some time this weekend building a raised bed for an asparagus patch. I have been meaning to do this on my property for years, as I've been relying on my neighbor's patch for most of my adult life, both Dana and Catie enjoy it as a springtime vegetable, and I appreciate it as a vegetable elevated by grilling it just right (when the very tip is blackening, get it off the heat.) The folk wisdom handed down to me is that a patch of asparagus is good for only about 30 years [yes, I know, "only"], and this patch was started in the mid '90s. I'm expecting it to start losing potency any year now. But I've hemmed and hawwed about doing it, and picked a spot and bought corms to plant, only to decide that I might need to use that spot for something else, and never committed the land to it.
My reluctance to start the asparagus patch has always been rooted in needing a place for it to last at least twenty years. It's not a fear of commitment, it's a realization that once it starts, it's two years of nothing useful, and then you've got to stick to that location. They look horribly sickly the first year, just some inedible scrawny feathers, they don't transplant well, and if you decide to change that spot to another crop, or abandon it after they have established themselves, the asparagus will break through and keep doing what they do. The startup is too much of an investment to change your mind, and then you're stuck with the decision.
When we got into starting this team at Catie's high school, I will confess a certain trepidation similar to the building of an asparagus patch. Because I've worked with college teams and two companies that have stayed a continuous entity for so long, I tend to put a question before myself with any venture, "Am I going to be in a position to make this last? Will I be able to get it started, and will I be able to get it to the point where it keeps going on its own, not just for one year but for decades?" I've passed on things that could give a quick boost, because I couldn't see the boost lasting. And getting sick in 2018 put a lot of doubt in my mind about such things, as to whether I personally could push on something for very long. In the past week however, I've heard both Catie and Dana make plans for the team for the summer, maybe we could invite the team out here and do a practice or do online practices. I was content to leave the summer to a reading list, a lot of audio of practice packets, and building study guides for fall, but it seems I'm getting outvoted in my own house. Looks like that asparagus is going to break through and is going to be something we can harvest next year.
At Catie's past dance competition, someone was doing a jazz routine to a song I had never heard before, but probably should have. I googled the lyrics later, and found it was "Vienna" by Billy Joel. Now the surprise to me was that someone was pulling a non-single track out 45 years after release, but I also found it had become popular on playlists during COVID, and had become attractive to lots of teenagers anxious about their achievements and worrying about achieving even more. It struck me that the reason it stuck out to me among the hundreds of tracks I heard that at the competition was it was the advice I could have used before I discovered quiz bowl.
For the fourth quarter at school, Catie has been moved up a track in a couple classes. We had wanted her to have an easier transition to high school, but she kind of found it too easy, and it was thought it would be less stressful in the new classes. But she has had a little bit of anxiety about the shift, and we've been talking that through on the way back from school, and how she wants to do all these things, the clubs, sports, go to prom. Last Saturday at dinner, the subject of college popped up at dinner, and everyone at the table except me jumped into their perfect plan for her future. They had the best intentions, but everyone's plan could too easily be decoded as what they'd have done the right way for themselves. I sat there quietly, knowing Catie was getting agitated by them, and I just mentioned that now, only three-quarters of the way through her freshman year, was not the time for choosing the next seven years, it was only time to eliminate the obvious non-fits from next year’s classes.
We drove back home by ourselves, and on the way I convinced her to listen to it among all the dance team’s solo songs. She's way too familiar with Billy Joel from the marching band's performances in the fall, but they've only really gone through the hits, and she's still learning the concept that albums exist and have deep cuts. Midway through the song I ended up repeating the line "You know you can't always see when you're right." That was the point where I saw her stop humoring me, and listen to the lyrics.
I've caught her listening to it five times in the past week. I wouldn't be surprised if she asks to dance her solo to it next year.