Week 196: The Pre-Mortem and the Countermeasures
Into the last practice.
[As you may have seen the outcome of this match has been leaked. Since the items I've written in advance of the event are already done, I'm not modifying these to reflect that.]
With the match upcoming, and one final opportunity to practice the next day, I spent an hour Monday doing the pre-mortem for the match. I had suggested this procedure in the book and I thought it would be valuable here.
A pre-mortem starts with the question about a project: "If at the end of this we see the project as a terrible catastrophe, what are all the ways it failed?" There are then follow up questions: "What are the key signs we will see when it goes wrong?", "How can we stop those intermediate steps from occurring?" , and "Are there any underlying causes which could be grouped together, that we could then attack and stop before they occur?" We can also ask the follow up question: "Is there anything which will directly save the project from one of these, and can we do that before there's a problem?"
The questions and the answers generated can tell you how you can save yourself from known knowns and known unknowns. That's about all you can do at the end of the project, and we are at that end. It's too late to begin an entire sweep of a major category, but we can figure out which minor ones will hurt us and act with countermeasures to avoid the worst disasters.
The pre-mortem in this case is simplified by the fact that all failures are equivalent results. Winning the match is success, but a failure condition is simply not winning. The only failure condition we had beyond that was simply not being able to connect to the zoom meeting on the day in question. Everything else was of the same form: We didn't know something, and our accumulated known unknowns would be larger than our known knowns.
So what will kill us, if it shows up?
This was my list of categories that we had to worry about.
Literature comes in hard and we are not prepared
In the first set of episodes, I've been waiting for a significant wave of literature questions. There hasn't been much, and when we've seen questions about authors, because they've been in picture rounds, they haven't had much of the title as clue interactions I've expected. Since the picture rounds aren't really set up for literature questions, there were only two places where this could appear in the format. In the 30-20-10 at the end, we'd be looking at a name the author format and they'd have to drop titles somewhere. Not ideal, but we'd be able to hit the 10 for almost all authors. But if literature were the subject of the 60-second round... that would be bad. We simply haven't gone through literature beyond their coursework and me mentioning several works that came up during practice. We hadn't attacked a lightning round of just books and authors, the two lightning rounds I put together on literature were literary museums and autobiographies, which were both edge work covering two subcategories. We hadn't really attacked the subject with speed and decisiveness, so I figured we'd have trouble with it. But would our opponents with less specific practice have a worse time in that situation? I don't know.
Geography hits hard
I've laid in a defensive pattern for geography in the picture rounds, and I like our chances with that. However when you remove the map and ask questions without pictures, I've seen the team's conversion go way down. Really getting all the geography down takes time, certainly more than we've devoted to it. The other factor to worry about here is that the new format has also taken the typical last clue of nations and capitals, and only slightly replaced it. That was the one geographic clue set I've drilled into the team from the start, with seven separate study guides. With the format change, this was a misallocation of resources, and I hoped we wouldn't get burned.
Science comes in hard
This is based on the curriculum, we're going in to this with one senior and two sophomores, and that means that whatever coursework happens in physics and computer science or later part of the year chemistry relies on one player.
A Vocabulary Round
I include this because I don't trust that it won't come back, but I feel without using images, these vocabulary rounds are such a pain to the moderator, and the team, that nobody's going to take significant advantage during it, and most likely outcome is also the least satisfying outcome: the top team maybe gets 10 points ahead, which isn't even a question's worth advantage in a different round.
However, if we're significantly worse than we think we are, a vocabulary round that is zero effect is probably better.
Math from beyond 10th grade
This is similar to science, except we're certain the questions will be asked in the fourth round. The team is all in geometry, and hasn't attacked anything in probability, statistics, trigonometry, or calculus. And those are basically the order in which they are most likely to appear.
I've already spent time in practice teaching factorials, but I added some math for building blocks of the above. My simulated round ran probability and logarithms as the two math questions. When both of them were struggles, I reviewed the situation with the team before the end of practice.
They suddenly open up "Current Events"
I wasn't worried about real recent current events in the same way the circuit thinks of them. Quiz bowl written for television has to filter out the current events that might fade between writing taping and airing. So someone like Sam Bankman-Fried is not likely to appear after his conviction. I was worried about a rerun of one of the categories from the first six episodes, where teams were asked to look at a picture of two people, one of whom was Barack Obama, and to identify the other person. This is a good way to introduce current events people who have at least stood the test of time, and are still relevant after ten years. But it's a big category to attack for the team, and cramming is less effective than constant observation of the category.
The team does not communicate effectively
This is just a worry. I know that we've had people missing practice in the run up to this. Soccer and Swim practices and stage crew for the musical have met in our practice hour. I worry the team doesn't know each other's strengths and weaknesses enough yet to trust each other and do it quickly. I think they know each other's strengths, but at the speed needed for television? And what other than more practice solves that problem? Not much.
The team does not bounce back quickly from a setback
This is the same box of worries as stage fright. you can work it out of them during weeks of practice, but you can't guarantee resilience until the event happens.
We don't cover the holes we can cover up in the next two days.
I wrote this pre-mortem on Monday, but by that point I had already written quizzes using pictures and put them on Kahoot, and I had written simulations of lightning rounds and had them ready to read for the last practice. While they've gotten these in enough time, anything I discover is lacking in the final practice is a known unknown.
What saves us?
So if those are the likely causes of death of this effort for this year, what would be the things that move things in our favor, and how likely are they to occur?
They return to the landmarks or art that we've already covered
This is the good bet. After the first episode, I compiled a powerpoint of 48 internationally recognizable landmarks. I had not added the landmarks which they had highlighted in the first episode, and used in questions. With us now sufficiently distant from them, I thought they might use those same pictures to ask new questions. I then did the same thing with an artwork powerpoint I had given them. Since showing it to them after the first episode, I've referred back to those slideshows whenever questions involving items in them occurred in practice. In questions involving landmarks or art, I believe I've forwarned them of their appearance. We'll see if they are forearmed to attack them.
Instead of general literature they go into mythology
This might be a general difference between circuit and television, but mythology doesn't displace another literature question in televised competition. Mythology was taught as a quarter of Literature in the ninth grade, and all the team had Mrs. Parker for that course. At a certain point you have to trust that your team was taught well in their previous coursework, and I trust Mrs. Parker on this. If we got mythology for the 60-second round it would be the dream draw.
All the Math is Geometry
A function of having sophomores as the bulk of the team. If we get geometry, we get what they're studying right now, and the ideas of congruent angles, complementary and supplementary means that any geometry question feels like a win.
Science stays near the periodic table or SI Units
Similar to math staying close to the subject matter, if the questions in science are based on the periodic table, or on SI units, both building blocks of the chemistry classes all team members are in, and using to work since the beginning of the school year, we're in a favorable position.
History stays near the Presidents
When preparing them last year, I put special emphasis on the types of questions that It's Academic wrote all the time. One of those patterns that always came up was the inclusion of presidents as answers for questions that were asking about American History. These haven't been present as much in this new format, but if there is regression to the mean, or the old style in a few questions, this will play to their strength.
Generally, Everything Repeats
Every competition and practice they've had brings them experience. The best thing we can hope for is some of that comes back in their match.
We act upon we see here
We deployed a series of countermeasures between Monday and Tuesday, based on these decisions. I printed four study guides on Monday, which I handed out to the team. The first page was a series of headshots of various people in the news, taken from Google News' headers. The remaining three pages were maps of the world, showing major deserts on one, oceans, major seas, and bays on the second, and major mountain ranges on the third. And I created a simulated game, based on what I saw in the previous matches and what I expected to see in ours.
The Simulated Game
Knowing that there were several rounds which were pictures of animals or plants, I chose to make that my round's "choice" first section. Echoing the Birds of America theme of one category round in Episode 3, I went with "Birds of the World." Knowing that they would get their round third, and would know their selection before the second team got their questions I gave them one minute for them to brainstorm what kinds of birds might be distinctive enough to be identifiable. I then presented them with five birds:
Flamingo
Toucan
Owl
Kiwi
Falcon (on the arm of a falconer to have additional distinguishing clues in the picture.)
Three out of five. Kiwi the bird was a bit harder to identify from its front than I thought and falcon with falconer was pretty grainy picture.
I then gave them their picture round with the advisory that the five pictures their opponents saw were: a body of water, a landmark, a painting, a map of a country, and a portrait of a Russian ruler. And I then reminded them to think of other answers that could be to similar questions. They then hit four out of five, nailing the Hagia Sophia, Venus from Birth of Venus, Mexico's shape, and Peter the Great, missing the Black Sea. Ok. 135 score.
Since I didn't know what sort of lightning round they'd face, and since my conclusion was it was likely to be an all-over category if it was the tail of the shipment, I fed them ten common clues that I just hoped for matching the writer's canon impulses.
1 was a format duplicate, identifying two Franklins were required in an earlier round. 3 was me playing to lit in the one place it could burn us, and the rest are just simple known associations that are filler, but filler I haven't seen show up in the aired rounds.
1. Two presidents had the first name Andrew, name both. Andrew Jackson and Andrew Johnson
2. bauxite is an ore of what element? aluminum
3. Who compiled poems like Song of Myself in his volume Leaves of Grass? Walt Whitman
4. What is the currency of India? (Indian) rupee
5. The Great Red Spot is a storm on what planet? Jupiter
6. The cat in Peter and the Wolf is performed by what woodwind known as a licorice stick? clarinet
7. Fort McHenry overlooked the harbor of what city? Baltimore
8. A lion's body with a woman's head describes what riddle-asking mythical creature? sphinx
9. What number is neutral on the pH scale? 7
10. Which state is known as the Land of Lincoln? Illinois
Five correct, 185 Not bad. More impressive from my standpoint, they passed on the questions they didn't know and got to all ten questions. Most teams in previous episodes haven't gotten the chance to hear all ten.
Math as I mentioned was probability and logarithms, figuring I needed to probe whether the team had that knowledge in place. They didn't, so I spent five minutes showing how the translation from logarithms to an exponential equation worked. Best I can do under the time constraints. 185 again.
For the last round I probed geography and classical music. I was pleased to see them hit Sicily for 30 points, based on First Punic War clues. I couldn't figure a place where music would fit other than in the 30-20-10 format since they already had a not-very well received music lightning round in episode 4. Since Brahms and Mozart were already used in previous episodes I gave them one on Beethoven, and they took that correctly for 20.
I then discussed four others who might fit into that position: Bach, Wagner, Verdi, Tchaikovsky.
235 final score.
So far, if you've scored over 200 in this format, you're ahead of the third place team every time, and 2/3 of the time you've beaten the second place score. So I felt OK. I worried I played a little to close to what I know are their strengths, and didn't hit the geography weakness as severely as I could. But I didn't think they would feel overmatched, be stage-frightened, or forget the little strategies to take advantage of the situations.
So what was the fundamental reversal that I mentioned last week, which we had to deal with? Well, before practice, I learned that we had to change our roster. Our senior, who has been practicing with us all semester, was out for the taping. But our sophomore, who has missed the last two months due to swimming practice after school, was available, and had already gotten her broadcast waiver signed. Now this was a small problem, just because I didn't know how much of the material we developed for this competition she had had the opportunity to view, but it at least wasn't fatal to our plans. This is why you always try to overrecruit, and have alternates for the team.
Twenty four hours to go. At this moment, all you can do is give them what you've shown them, and trust in those who have taught them previously.