Week 243: Avoiding the rush
[I'm writing this up Sunday morning because the Steelers are on bye, and I have to figure that some proportion of my audience will not in a state of mind to consume this the day after the election. So I figure there's a chance I won't be in a state to produce this. Cut, paste, schedule for 11:00]
After I dealt with the perpetual reddit question of "how to get good" last week, I saw the other perpetual reddit/forum question, "Is writing questions a good way to get better?" This at least I can give a positive answer to, partly because the players asking the question in these most recent instances are further along in their development than those asking the previous question. Writing is something that you can do to effectively build up your knowledge in subjects, but before you can do it, you need to have seen enough questions to know their basic structure.
I'm not going to say as a general rule that all players are ready to write questions. I like to believe that about college players, but that's probably me applying the rules of the 1990s to the 2020s. In that time, if you weren't writing, you generally weren't attending tournaments, so it was a necessary process in the development of players. But for high school players and below, writing questions is a luxury production which can get them to greater heights, but it isn’t a workable idea when they are just starting to play. There needs to be some familiarity with the format and structure of whatever questions they are planning to construct. That requires experience.
It has to be developed as a habit. The main value of writing is that it valuable in a very small way, by creating a repeat of information that the writer has encountered before. For that reason an individual act of writing a single question is not all that valuable. It’s only when you do it repeatedly that you move the needle productively. Developing the habit and committing to the habit is what produces the result sought for.
The writer has to suggest it as an action for themselves to undertake. You can suggest a habit to another person, but it won’t be as effective for the writer until they assess and agree that it would be helpful. Their own investment is required in the habit, otherwise it’s just an assignment.
The writer needs an end use or uses for the questions they produce, and they need evaluation of their questions. It has to go somewhere to be used. That can be self-directed in practice (creating questions to use as flashcards for personal use,) or it can be directed towards a teammate’s practice (reading questions in practice,) or towards people beyond the team (compiling for packet submission tournaments, centrally edited tournaments, or for a tournament set of their own design)
As coach your job will be to get them to believe in their own material, harness their creativity, and help them direct their habit to assist them and assist others on your team. Once they are committed to the habit, they can convert their own coursework into questions for the team, essentially making a study technique for both quiz bowl and their coursework. They can work on their own weaknesses as they identify them through practice, and choose to develop questions which help remove their weaknesses. They can store their questions in a flashcard application, and use it for spaced repetition practice.
But what’s even more powerful than self-direction and study, is when they apply the product of their newfound habit to teammates. Writing is the first point in the development of a player where they can realize they can positively benefit the development of another player. Every question they developed for themselves can be consumed by teammates, either through practice or individual study. If they see things that their teammates don’t know, they may start to develop questions specifically to help them to learn things that they know. Once the habit is developed, the product of that habit, questions, act as a force multiplier for your team, now and in the future, for teammates which aren’t even currently on the team.
I was allowing my RSS feed to guide my reading, when this story on the investigation on the collapse of the Arecibo telescope passed through.
I had followed the collapse of Arecibo at the time of it, but if had faded from memory and interest in the years since. But when the summary of this put the words "zinc creep" in front of me, I was rather frightened to remember that most of Materials Science MSE261, the course I took in college, had returned to the front of mind. Because the last classes in that course dealt with diffusion creep with a specialization in irradiation. So I pulled the three ring binder off the shelf of my office (fortuitous in that both I had saved the book (written by Cornell professors for the course, and printed in a 3-ring) and that I had saved it from the vault in the other building.)
While I’m accepting of their theory of the case, what puzzles me about their hypothesis is that every bit of irradiation creep described in the course related to higher frequency radiation, which could produce the effect in a medium. X-rays, gamma rays and the like. Radio waves, on the opposite end of the spectrum past visible light, weren't considered at all. I had attributed that to the notion that so-called ionizing radiation could cause creep, but non-ionizing couldn't. (No proof of that on my account, and I had just internalized that as a likely reason we weren't discussing it.) What I’m probably missing in attributing zinc creep is just how much radio signal was propelled across the anchor cables, and thus passed enough energy at the right frequencies to migrate atomic vacancies along the defects in the crystals of the metal. And if that sounds like I’m waving my hands up in resignation and putting faith that they’re the experts and I’m just knowledgeable enough to be able to follow, well, you’re not wrong.
I'll tie this to something quiz bowl here. I'm pretty sure I was the first to mention the phenomenon of irradiation creep in quiz bowl, but I only did it in a sense of the word “creep” in a general knowledge slotted question. That’s a derided method of canon expansion these days, but sometimes you just don’t have another way.
The other story I found is much simpler and much easier to tie to quiz bowl. The tallest peak in Tennessee, Clingman's Dome, has been reverted to the local indigenous name of Kuwohi. Name changes, especially recent name changes that become current events questions, make their presence known in quiz bowl, because the reformat the answer line. Once they happen, they cannot be avoided, if you want to talk about the subject of the name change.
Some will take this as a controversial point, but we have to accept that recent name changes may not be universal knowledge. Knowledge spreads unevenly, and while it may lead to an awkward situation, it is a situation which is able to be remedied through what is given to the moderator. But the alternative is to not ask about those that have changed names at all, which is even less logical or fair.