Week 190: The View from the Bottom of the Iceberg
And a note on self-portraits and autobiographies
I’ve been spending the last couple days putting together the list of coaches for this area, at least the ones that I know about. This is something I usually knock out around September while I’m watching episodes of the TV show, but this slipped through while I was dealing with other things. [gestures vaguely in every direction.] The reason this became of such importance this week was my impending scheduling of a tournament for the team this weekend. At various points this semester, both Pitt and CMU had scheduled a tournament for November 4, and when I asked about it two weeks ago, I was told they had filled their field and Seton couldn’t come. Hi-Ho, I thought, as I had been waiting for the registration form to appear. Turns out they had used hsqb’s forum, and got to sixteen (their staffin limit) in 24 hours. But they also needed a reader and a buzzer, so I asked if they had a waitlist. And sure enough, two days later we had a spot.
My fit of pique in this came not from the initial missing out, but from the fact I knew exactly how many teams missed out on a chance to attend. But let’s step back from that phrase, I know inexactly how many teams missed out on a chance to attend, I’m probably off by about 10% give or take. I know the size of the general possible field you could generate in Western Pennsylvania. But in order for that to happen contacts have to be made.
For this map of Pennsylvania I’m going to give you a tour of Western Pennsylvania as I know it, circling around the city of Pittsburgh. The Intermediate Unit map is the good boundary system because IU’s control the state format and each unit’s governance of gifted education usually means that the school’s gifted coordinator is the coach. It’s also a good first cut if you don’t know who to contact at that school.(I have a lot of issues with that, because I know how much value students that aren’t in the gifted program can gain from quiz bowl, and I know how small schools struggle with fielding teams of only gifted students.)
In IU1, where I live, there’s four leagues of 7 to 9 schools, with varsity and JV teams of five. A couple of the schools in Westmoreland County (IU7) play in IU1 leagues, because there’s no space in IU7’s two leagues. IU8’s four counties split into two leagues of sixteen teams each, one focussed around Johnstown, and one around Altoona. IU10, around State College, is almost too far for a day trip to a tournament, but that hasn’t stopped people in the past. IU9 does a one-day regional tournament, but teams have come down to Pittsburgh before. Erie’s IU5 teams have come down I-79 for years, but now that there’s a televised competition on WQLN, there’s more demand up there. IU6 is a League, as is IU28. IU4 and IU27 on the Ohio border are the major bastion of Academic Games League of America, which has kept quizbowl from gaining a foothold, but December will see a tournament for Beaver County schools. Taking those alone, you have over 100 schools which compete in some form of annual quiz bowl competition.
That brings us to Allegheny County (IU3) and City of Pittsburgh (IU2), which have little control exerted by the IU system. There are no leagues in the county, but plenty of schools, over half of the schools competing on the TV program are in county. And the only way to find out who to contact at those schools is to watch the program and take careful notes and look them up in faculty directories. Good thing I record that information on my charting of the show. It was at this moment when I realized I shouldn’t be angry. I should just be more insistent in showing people how many other schools are out there, because I was the one keeping the information they need.
As I compile this, I’m just past 100 schools that I have emails in this state. I’m being careful to check my records from previous years since there’s a lot of turnover on the show, between schools in and out of the field, and coaches retiring or moving on. None of this has ever had a whisper on hsqb. It’s never reached a critical mass of contacts going from one town to the next, but I know each of the connections, and I know how fragile they are. Now at least I don’t have to spring for the postage I used to have to, and maybe I can get some of the hosts around here to promote themselves for the next event, and the one after that.
This is one of the insidious parts of forums that frustrates outreach, if you’re able to fill your program’s event to its limit without much effort, you won’t feel you need to effort in future. But you certainly need to put yourself out there to grow your team, so you can work beyond today’s limit. I often think of the forums as existing on the top of the iceberg, but I’ve spent my time almost exclusively trying to find out what’s going on at the bottom of the iceberg.
When you stop looking for teams you limit your own program’s ability to serve the community, which means to a degree you’re limiting your own program’s growth. Public recruiting of local teams to your event, even if they don’t have much chance of attending, is a way to promote your team’s growth in future years. Before someone knows that they want to continue playing in college, they often need to know the team exists at the college.
This week’s lesson from watching the new format is one that is applicable to all formats. Self-portraits will always come up because they eliminate a clue and a possible answer by reflexive properties.
This was the first episode which dedicated a slot to paintings. There have been questions before, but this was the first time that a question dedicated to art was slotted into each general knowledge round, and each artwork was a self portrait of an artist who had a distinctive look.
What this does is reduce down the possible answers in a fairly clever way. The questions that can be asked about a painting normally, collapse down to a reduced set of possible answers:
Who does this look like? - Reduces to the artist.
Who does this look like painted it? - Reduces to the artist.
What is the title of this painting? - Probably doesn't matter because it will commonly be referred to as Self-portrait of the artist.
When the answers align like this, the writer doesn't need to worry about the question possibly tripping up the player who didn’t pay attention to the identifier at the question's beginning. No matter how we talk about the painting, it's going to be the same answer. We don't have to include the painting's title, we don't have to carry much detail. In the previous show's style, we could include the shortest title also by this artist. In this version of the show, another title isn't seen as necessary and the visual clues are all aligned so that all that’s necessary to say is “who is this?” Once the writer sees the effectiveness of this strategy in writing, and how it can compact and streamline how they write, they'll use the technique again.
This is why I added a set of ten self-portraits to the slideshows, and I started looking at other ways to use this technique to suggest possible questions that might come up. I settled on autobiographies, since I knew we've been light on literature so far in this show, and it would seem a likely way to introduce that into the show with other titles. It also seemed a way to sneak other questions on people in other fields into the set, and it is adaptable to become earlier clues in longer questions. That is of course, once one eliminates from the list anything with the author's name in the title and those redundantly titled like "Autobiography of My Life."
I almost considered namesake laws and principles, since the math of the equations could be displayed, and the question could be phrased to include all the last clues we’d expect, but I think that’s a better lesson taught after the information of this lesson sinks in.
The most general phrasing of this is that if you find a tool or technique that makes it easier to write a question or makes the question stronger, it's highly unlikely that you're the first to use it, but you can prepare for its use, by showing its utility and examples.
Next week, we’ll go over what happened at the tournament, and we’ll see where we are on prep for the show. Our taping date has been set, and we’re less than a month away.