Week 203: On Building a New Study Guide

And how to talk to your kids about the scourge of Benet's

If you cannot find an appropriate study guide or source online which is narrowly focused to the scope you want to deliver, you may have to create it yourself. This section is a guide to how to figure out what you want to do before you do it.

Before embarking on the task of creating a study guide, you really need to look at what's available in existing study guides. This is especially true for a coach, because the coach doesn’t get the benefit of immediately being able to turn research into buzzes. A careful search of the internet through video images and articles before committing to the task is advised.

The first thing you must do is determine the size and scope of the project you're assigning yourself. Does this have the amount of information that needs to be conveyed that can be contained on an index card? A sheet of paper? Multiple pages? These are the three sizes I usually break things down into.

For comparative sizes:

• The Trimurti of Hinduism is information that fits on an index card. This is next on my list of notecards to write for the stack of cards I proposed doing in the fall.

• The building of the Panama Canal, failed efforts to build a canal, and the treaties the US signed to facilitate the construction, that's a study sheet. This was a PDF I did for the Pitt team at one point in the 2000s,

• And what I did for this project, a summary of the works that come up in high school world literature was multiple pages (specifically at last count 20.)

The second thing to determine is the viability of the information. You want to know how often someone encounters this subject in its category, and how often its subcategories appear in the system. When completed, would the guide cover a broad enough subject to justify the work constructing it? Will the contents of the guide be worth frequent study? If the answers to those two questions are "no," than you shouldn't prioritize this. Notice I'm not saying that you shouldn't do this, just that it shouldn't be at the top of your things to develop a guide. As you find things that are necessary to have guides for, you build up a priority queue.

Finally you can fine tune your queue by asking the question "Does my team need this? Do they need this NOW?" The first part is a function of you realizing there is a hole in your team's knowledge which directly overlaps what you intend to include. The second part is a function of you realizing that what would be covered by the study guide will be encountered in your next match, or will be seen in many upcoming matches. This last part depends on your team having an upcoming event with tangible expectations of what will be asked.

Now we'll apply this logic to the process done last week of drafting a world literature guide for the team.

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Base your decision on hard evidence if you can find it: Between the NAQT high school distribution and the publicly listed frequency lists, you can assign an value of world literature (not-British or American, or English language) to about 16 tossups and 15 bonuses in a tournament. (That combines four categories in the NAQT distribution: https://www.naqt.com/hs/distribution.jsp

Religious Literature > Non Judeo Christian 2/1
Literature > Non English Literatures 12/11
Mythology > Non European Mythology 1/1
Mythology > Non Classical Mythology 1/1
For a total of 16/15, or 1.25/1.1 a packet.

(it's possible the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid could be grouped under Classical Mythology, in which case a small percentage of 5/4 could be added to this.)

Then you can filter through the top 100 works of literature, and end up with a list of around 40 topics to cover.

  Iliad	Homer
  Odyssey Homer
  Aeneid Virgil
  The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri
  Don Quixote	Miguel de Cervantes
  Crime and Punishment	Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky
  Les Miserables	Victor-Marie Hugo
  Anna Karenina	Leo Tolstoy
  War and Peace	Leo Tolstoy
  The Three Musketeers	Alexandre _Dumas_ pere
  One Hundred Years of Solitude	Gabriel _Garcia Marquez_
  A Doll's House	Henrik Johan Ibsen
  The Count of Monte Cristo	Alexandre _Dumas_ pere
  Things Fall Apart	Albert Chinualumogu Achebe
  The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  Decameron	Giovanni Boccaccio
  All Quiet on the Western Front	Erich Maria Remarque
  The Hunchback of Notre Dame	Victor Hugo
  Bhagavadgita and  Mahabharata 
  The Metamorphosis	Franz Kafka
  The Cherry Orchard	Anton Chekhov
  Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea	Jules Verne
  Cry, the Beloved Country	Alan Paton
  The Trial	Franz Kafka
  Around the World in Eighty Days	Jules Verne
  The Tale of Genji	Lady Murasaki
  The Plague	Albert Camus
  Doctor Zhivago	Boris Pasternak
  Lysistrata	Aristophanes
  Cyrano de Bergerac	Edmond Rostand
  The Kalevala	Elias Lonnrot ed.
  Love in the Time of Cholera	Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  The Clouds	Aristophanes
  Metamorphoses	Ovid
  Rhinoceros	Eugene Ionesco
  The Song of Roland
  Candide  Voltaire

There’s a certain pyramid of details at work here, where the deeper you go, the more clues you gather and details you observe:

• Books and Authors lists (almanac, best sellers list, reading lists)

• Benet's Readers Encyclopedia (one paragraph)

• Masterplots (one page summaries)

• Other questions (infused with noise and preference of players, but the repeated exposure to different questions sorts the clues’ utility by their frequency.)

• Actually reading the books.

The starting point of the study guide, the list itself, is a skim of the category, with just titles and authors, but that’s a starting point, and something to start your team with. The next level that we want to give the team needs at least one sentence on each of these, but we can do better than that low bar, though it demands we open up the forbidden texts.

This is a backdoor method of introducing your team to Benet’s.

Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia is a book I have frequently referred to as being the only book ever banned from quiz bowl for being too effective. And in this case, it is very effective in delivering what I want to deliver to the team. I want the team to have enough context of each book on that list, so that they know what it is about, what are the major characters, and setting, and what is important about the book, including facts about its author. These books are frequently written about in quiz bowl, but in most school’s literature curriculum, few of these are covered. The Benet’s entries for these books are the way to confirm their importance, get an additional round of exposure to the answers, and give the team something to study in a category that is usually uncontested among teams with less experience.

So this was the form it would take as a study guide, the summary articles from Benet’s for all of these works, except for those published after the encyclopaedia’s compilation. Guess who had done that for the other selections? Yeah, that’s right. I hadn’t intended to, but the missing books published after this 1950’s edition were all covered in The 99 Critical Shots of Quiz Bowl. Sometimes I know what I’m doing.

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You should create a physical guide to give yourself a hard boundary that you should not exceed. I didn’t want this to be too long, but I knew certain articles could take entire pages when clipped. I had set a mental limit of one half-page per entry on average and when I ended up at 19 pages and expecting 20, I figured I had first time-luck.

You need a metric to figure out how far down the long tail you should travel. This was just about right in that I stopped after 100 high frequency entries and filtered out the literature in English for my first pass. I also tried to limit authors to two works, figuring that three would make a single author look too important. I’m not sure if this criterion might omit an author with a number of works that get referred to together in questions, (Moliere would be the canonical example of this class,) but I’m satisfied with this being done in a week.

You should use available metrics. You should use available sources. Creating any sort of study guide from scratch is hard. I didn’t want to pore over dozens of packets to confirm my hypothesis of these covering 90% of the World lit questions for high school, so publicly available lists and some mathematical eyeballing of total mentions in the divided by slots available gave me confidence I was close to the right value. I didn’t want to spend more than a few hours putting this together for the team and so cut and paste it was.

This is also why I’m not posting this in here. I’ve given you the list, the link to the book I cut and pasted from, and my reasoning. Creating one of these for your team is literally an exercise for the reader. And guess what, if you have an ambitions player who would benefit from the familiarity with each article as they put it in their personal study guide, or you really want to include some other things I didn’t, you have the power to make a better model than this.

You should document your sources. Not only does this give the authors credit for the parts that you lifted wholesale, but documenting the sources you used for the study guide permits you to direct your players to go to the work and if they’re interested, explore the landscape of the source. I had forgotten how much history, music and mythology was listed in Benet’s, and the power of stumbling upon the articles on the same page of what your were looking up is a method of discovery that players don’t get as much of any more.

You need to figure out what to omit. This started with a discussion with Mrs. Parker in last weeks class, and it started this week’s practice with a discussion. Before I presented this to the team, I had to check if there was anything in this that was something that would be in classes later on. Mrs. Parker teaches literature for the 9th and 10th grade students, and I didn’t want to overstep my boundaries by proposing items to study which were ahead in the year, or part of some later class in the progression. We agreed that we were clean, the world lit they cover is mostly newer than the things on the list. The one match, The Odyssey, was first semester of ninth grade, so everyone was already past that. I didn’t want to take away from their potential enjoyment of literature they’d go through later by pointing them to the paragraph summary. That is the bad edge of Benet’s, but its good edge was preserved by this use, pointing them to things they wouldn’t encounter normally that might be of interest, either for reading for enjoyment, or familiarity for quiz bowl.

The one thing I need to figure out about this is whether I hesitated on this because of the seeming lack of need for it in televised competition, or if I hesitated because it was out of my area. It’s something I should have attempted last year, and I somehow didn’t take it into consideration.

The test run of this in this week’s practice went perfectly. I ran it against two packets, and with that sample, I expected 4-5 questions to hit the distribution categories. Of those that turned up, I hit 4 of the 5 questions matching items in the list, and the fifth was one on literary cats which would have brushed against The Master and Margarita, which if I had gone longer would have been one of the last cuts.

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Because the above ran long, I’m moving the next item to next week. I’m going to take a different look at this same data which started this exercise. I’ll show you how a set of data can be converted into raw material for lots of practice questions, Anki flashcards, or even simulacra of television questions.

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OTW

# Poem OTW: Sonnet 18
https://poets.org/poem/shall-i-compare-thee-summers-day-sonnet-18

# Poet OTW: William Shakespeare
https://poets.org/poet/william-shakespeare

# YouTube Terminology Video OTW

# Art Movement OTW: Futurism
https://artsandculture.google.com/entity/futurism/m01hl64

# Painting OTW: Unique Forms of Continuity in Space
https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/unique-forms-of-continuity-in-space-umberto-boccioni/jAHAQTsYPpJQpA

# Mythological Figure OTW: Callisto
https://pantheon.org/articles/c/callisto.html

# Bridge OTW: Bridge of Sighs, Venice
https://www.tripsavvy.com/bridge-of-sighs-1548015

# Mineral OTW: Quartz
https://mineralseducationcoalition.org/minerals-database/quartz/

# Vasari's Life of the Artist OTW: Donatello
https://archive.org/details/livesofmostemine02vasauoft/page/238/mode/2up

# National Park OTW: Yosemite
https://www.nps.gov/yose/index.htm

# Periodic Table OTW: Oxidation States
https://www.compoundchem.com/2015/11/17/oxidation-states/

# Presidential Election OTW: 1892
https://www.270towin.com/1892_Election/

# Battle OTW: Tsushima Straits
https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2022/february/drifting-toward-tsushima

# Star OTW: Antares
https://earthsky.org/brightest-stars/antares-rivals-mars-as-the-scorpions-heart/

# Constellation Mythology OTW: Cancer
http://comfychair.org/~cmbell/myth/cancer.html

# Chemistry History OTW: Alexander Fleming and Penicillin
https://www.acs.org/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/flemingpenicillin.html

# History Podcast OTW

# Roman Emperor OTW: Caligula
https://www.pbs.org/empires/romans/empire/caligula.html

# In Our Time OTW: The Manhattan Project
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00108h1

# You Gotta Know OTW: Short Story Authors
https://www.naqt.com/you-gotta-know/short-story-authors.html

# Team History OTW: Milwaukee Bucks
https://www.nba.com/bucks/history