First thing: As before, stop reading and just watch it.
Prior to taping Mrs. Parker brought Mr. Parker in to set up the video, so hopefully we're shot from a little less odd angled than last time.
I knew from a Monday email that we'd be picking second, and we taped on Wednesday. I thought that I should have given more preparation to hanging your opponent with the worst option, if you don't really have a preference as to what you get.
Category rounds to choose from: Nazi Germany, ‘F’ in Science, Artists (+25 correct/-0 incorrect)
Coming into the first round, our team wanted Nazi Germany because World History had just gone through that era a month earlier. When Pine-Richland took that first, the team was visibly disappointed. I told them "what's your second choice and what's the answers that are going to be there?"
Would we have been better off taking Artists? I don't know. I think the correct category was sent to South Side. While they are an experienced circuit team, an art category in television is often just the painting as the entirety of the clue, which is a clue that a circuit team doesn't often get. Even if we didn't realize why it was the right decision in game time, it was the right way to keep the game in our control.
Our category "F in Science" showed where the difficulty had jumped. Formic acid was the first organic chemistry the show had shown all year. I had not made the point that difficulty was going to jump, largely because I didn't know the degree to which it was going to jump.
Fibula was irritating to me for two factors. I had done bones as a study guide for the team, but I did it in May of last year, and I didn't return to it this year because I hadn't seen any need to go after it. So it was covered in the least memorable time of the year, and it wasn't covered this year. The second reason of irritation was that it was one of the things I saw as essential knowledge for last year's writer. Having anatomy, even just the skeleton, in your back pocket was valuable in previous years. Aside from one 30-20-10 this year, it wasn't useful, and I never gave them a study guide for this year that included it. If you remember from the pre-mortem, I said I was starting to think more recent questions were tending back to the style of last year's questions. Well...I could have put this particular 2 and that particular 2 together.
As for Fibonacci, I should have pushed harder for that to be called correct, South Side did a similar thing on Hopper. What was worse was that I used Fibonacci in a math question for the team previously. But our captain wasn't there on that day, and so she wasn't familiar with the exact pronunciation.
When I sent the broadcast release forms to the producer, I mentioned the idea of designating a player could be added to the rules pretty easily. That would have helped us there, but it wasn't in the ruleset.
We're down 100-50-50, but it wasn't the way I expected it.
Picture Round: 5 different picture based questions. (+20/-20)
When we started preparing for this new format, I did two slideshows for the team. One was on Landmarks and one was on Paintings. Though this could have worked for us, there were three points of failure here:
1) In the Landmarks list, I stopped at 50. Sitting in the next 5 or so was the Potala Palace, because I figured religious landmarks would serve two categories with a single picture. But you have to cut the long tail somewhere, and I did it right there, and then I cut a couple off the list which I figured were duplicative, ending at 48.
2) El Greco's Burial of Count Orgaz was in the list of paintings, though they showed a detail of that painting. It was even in the final 40 of that list, with a picture of the painting. But when I recapped the list into a new slideshow for practice, I went back to the artists that I knew had been repeated, instead of going deeper into my original list.
3) Both of these slideshows were introduced in October. Alex joined the team after the first taping. I didn't push the slideshows to him because I figured the team would have the memory with them.
For the remaining questions of the round, they weren't preparation issues, they were just questions that were a little unexpected. The Sarong was me not thinking they could come back with fashion at a sufficient level for us to be able to handle it. In previous rounds, they asked questions about kimonos and panama hats, so I should have seen a little pattern. And I could have recommended the episodes of the Floor for this sort of thing.
Calliope was one that hurt because I felt it should have had one additional clue, that the name was also the name of a mythological muse. But that's the choice of the writer, and quite defendable.
Going into round three, we were at zero. They didn't put us at negative. But we were on tilt. Hell, I was on tilt and I haven't been on tilt since I was in high school. They were starting to jitter because they felt their set was much harder than the others. I wasn't having that argument because I knew that South Side's answers of Holbein and Escobar were very solid pulls that experience had given them. But I was also on tilt because I could have made that a lot less difficult for them, if I had gone back over the stuff we'd done through before rather than trying to cover more difficult, less likely material.
60 second round: 10 questions one category. Today’s category: Numbers (+10/0)
The Numbers category is just kind of there to torture me. It's a little computation, a little title hunting (which we didn't like in our first match), and a little of the one question that the circuit never asks because they think it's beneath them: the count of items. 88 piano keys, 32 pieces on a chessboard, 118 elements. These are in a way, the least important detail about a subject, but they are something that is asked when you want to create questions about a subject that are as accessible as possible. You may not be able to answer detail, but you can certainly count. Where I put myself on tilt with this is that I actually guessed at this pattern during the last practice. In the questions about the Constitution and Amendments, I asked the question of the number of amendments, but that didn't come up.
Counting questions also trap you in that if you know it cold you can guess, if you don't know it cold you think you can count yourself to a solution. But counting takes time, and in this particular round counting kills your access to the questions at the end of the list. If you're charting at home, you'll notice we got through 8 of our questions, the other teams heard all ten.
I kind of knew we were stuck going into this round because it wasn't a round that you could put a major comeback together.
It was also a kind of trap round that you couldn't help but spend time computing some of the answers. That ran into conflict with the impulse to pass that I knew they needed to do for more shots at easier questions. Seeing that they got through eight, when the other teams got through ten hurt a little.
Math Time 2 questions (+20/-20)
As much time as I spent on computation, and as close as it came to derailing us in the first match, I was actually very proud of how far they'd come with that.
More or Less (depending on number of clues used: +30 to +10/-30 to -10)
You remember in the pre-mortem where I said that the team wasn't really prepared for chestnuts... Well, this was on me. I should have thought of this chestnut. Sports hasn't mattered in this season so I hadn't touched it at all. Baseball, especially old baseball is not something the circuit asks about. But the moment that question started I knew it was going dead, and I could have prevented it.
So the team did what they could, and came up lacking. Part of that is what happens when you advance to the next level, part of that was me giving them advice that was not useless in general, but definitely in the specific. We still achieved our goal for the year, and more. It didn't feel good afterwards, but it was the immediate aftertaste of defeat.
After the match, I found the other teams' emails, and mailed their coach with a good game message. I did after the first game, and I’ll do it after defeat if we're playing remotely. I see it as a substitute for the handshake line we often do in person. And if I make it a standardization, there's coaches who will take up the cause, and suddenly every coach who lost has an email for another coach that they can ask questions of.
And then between that night and publication, I worked out the post mortem.
Post Mortem:
Maybe I didn't communicate that I knew what they were getting into in the playoffs.
I knew there was an increment in difficulty coming, because simply this was the 30th of 40 matches that were written. At a certain point in the year the writer is going to exhaust all the stuff that they like to write and that they want to include for ease of answering, and expand to things that are a little harder. In any format, when that happens it's going to be a little harder than the writer expects, or the teams are ready for.
To do #1: Organic Chem.
I didn't cover organic chem, because I wasn't expecting them to go into organic chem. I have a college-level study sheet for Organic Chem for quiz bowl, but not one for high school. There’s certainly more chemistry to give them that is not part of the periodic table in circuit play, but there’s a smaller amount of more chemistry that could have shown up in the show.
To do #2: Review bones and the other common things I expected from last year.
I didn't cover bones this year. I should have gone through it again because I did put a skeletal chart in at the last moment last year. And I bet nobody remembers it. For all those things
To do #2a: Because your lineup changed, you need to return to the things you taught before.
Yes it will be review for the players who sat through the discussion last time. Reviewing the last year's stuff isn't a bad idea.
To do #2b: If you have a conversation about something with one player, and recommend something to study, recommend it to the whole team.
While I'm sure the idea of using The Floor as a study guide is mockable, it also would have helped. It would have helped more if I had mentioned it to more of the team than Catie.
To do #2c: Figure out a better way to push information to the entire team.
In multiple pieces of the year's tournaments and matches, there were cases where I had something that I mentioned during practice, that came up. There's two problems with that. I wasn't capturing that information for review later, and it has been a very rare thing to have the entire team available for practice. In fall it was soccer practice; in winter, swimming; and in spring it's been the musical. That's been the main problem with practice in the weeks following taping. Musical practice went into overdrive, and half the team went there assuming there was nothing more to do for the year for quiz bowl, we cancelled practice for this week preemptively because opening night for the musical was Thursday.
To do #3: Explain the sting of playing on tilt to the team.
We left that match on tilt. Unfortunately, the team hasn't been together since then. When I said that they were playing on tilt, I meant it from past experience. I'm going to have to tell them the story of the worst game my team ever played, and how I realized that tilt self- sabotages. It would have been a better story immediately after the match, but musical practice intervened. And I guess you're going to have to hear it too. So next week I'll retell the story for them in practice and for you.