Week 205: A Small Piece of Undefended Territory

Psychology and elective courses in high school

Feb 15, 2024

Last week I made a guide for the team for psychology. Psychology was something that came up in practice the week of the exploration of world literature as a similar sort of subject, which was not offered as an elective course at Seton LaSalle. This was something I found interesting because my less than stellar high school had psychology as an elective, and I was surprised to find my school ahead of them in a category.

I assembled a quick guide from available materials: links to two NAQT You Gotta Knows, (appearing down below.) The charts of Piaget's stages of development, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, and an infographic comparing classical and operant conditioning. I then found an online textbook (thank you Hackensack Schools) and pointed a link to the chapter on history of psychology.

Everything is History of Development

That final step, including the History of Psychology chapter is key and it was something that was both necessary and an afterthought on my part. To a first approximation, most subjects in high school competition which are in a subject of science, social science, or fine art, are really in the subject of "the history of the development of" that subject. Science turns to history of the development of science quite easily whenever a person's proper name enters the question. Art questions often draw themes from the movement of ideas about art passing through the artists. Social science questions drop names of formulators of concepts because they're a convenient last clue and answer for when the concept is the last clue.

When it's History of Development it's not Deep

I didn't want to go too in depth, but I wanted to make it cover what was likely to be asked about. And social sciences are often limited to history because getting to the point of being to write about the concepts of social science often requires the writer and the player to have much more subject knowledge than can be reasonably expected in the field of players in high school. A question for say a fun event at a professional convention could go into depth (and often does) but also leads to possible ambiguity in the answer. For the environs of the circuit and television, we've traded some depth in the subject for clarity in adjudication.

Undefended Territory

The bug I wanted to put in the team's ear with this was the concept of undefended territory. I consider undefended territory in quiz bowl to be any subject which does not tie directly to a required course in the curriculum, and which is not likely to be popular with the general public outside of school. They are things that are judged more important by the people asking the questions than the educational system at large.

Two pieces to compare here are the distribution on which you will be competing and your own school's curriculum, and the state mandates for high school graduation. That neatly separates out what is required from what is likely to be an elective in the local area if it is covered at all.

The principle here is that if nobody is paying attention to a category, because it's not part of the curriculum, the team that has competence in the basic category's answers and last clues will collect the points, as long as they act ahead of teams blind guessing. If the territory is undefended, you don't need much strength to attack it.

This principle is not limited to the circuit. The television program's emphasis on visuals has made knowledge of art quite valuable to our team, and we've attacked the subject specifically because it offers us a scoring advantage over our opponents.

If your school has an elective course which is atypical of other schools in your area, and that course is also a subject which has a sufficiently wide base in quiz bowl, your team can build an advantage in that category by either recruiting someone who has taken the course, consulting with the teacher teaching the course, or having a member of the team take the course.

The double-edged sword of this is that you might not need the entire course to develop quiz bowl skill in the subject. Relying on the course to be taken to net the knowledge is somewhat counterproductive. Since most elective courses are taken in upper grades in high school, they also limit the time where the knowledge is useful. In our case, if we waited to take the art appreciation courses that are available, we'd lose out on opportunities until those courses are taken. It certainly would have cost us this year.

A slightly different case

While this is applicable for most subjects, math and science would not be served by this. Because the majority of math and science courses are not separable, but run in a sequence, they can't be approached in the same way as electives which are also categories in the distribution. So while I could attack psychology in this way for the tenth graders in the practice, I'm not able to give them the same sort of guide for physics, which remains a problem for the team.

The lesson for me in this

The lesson for me was that I could pretty freely tackle any category that isn't part of the schools curriculum. Since it doesn't appear as a course that students could take, there's no reason to interpret teaching for quiz bowl as spoiling the subject for a later teacher's class. Even a short survey of a subject in undefended territory is value added to the school and the team. It makes team membership more useful to interested students. If it becomes known that you're helping in these categories which aren't taught, it lessens the possibility that a teacher may not help you feeling a threat to their subject.

I’m cutting this week short because I thought I had something very nice to present, but I didn’t do it very well in practice, and I want to write in what I wanted to put into it here. Next week will be another piece of undefended territory, Opera. But what I was proud of in presenting it to the team was how I tied it to the idea of first, middle, and last clues. But I didn’t do the presentation as cleanly as I wanted, so next week I’ll walk you through what I wanted that to look like.

The other thing that happened was I completed my reading and note taking on The Smart Take from The Strong, the coaching text of longtime Princeton basketball coach Pete Carril. I took copious notes on this, intending to use this as a way to get better familiar with note taking in Obsidian. Unfortunately, I fell into old habits and did the last half of the book’s notes in longhand on paper. In some subsequent edition of this, I’ll take those notes and draw our the similarities between basketball as Carril taught it and quiz bowl. I had always had trouble making the analogy between the two, despite knowing there were common designs between them. This book helped me make those connections a lot more easily.