I expect this to be a short one this week, partly because I’m running around Wednesday night, and realizing very few people want something in their inbox on the midnight before Thanksgiving, but also partly because, in writing this up, one of the kittens decided to use my sternum as a resting spot, so Tuesday’s attempt to write this became an exercise in futile dictation and voice recognition. Still that’s a record for the kittens’ staying in one place.
The one followup from last week is that I’ve managed to complete the pocketmod for Greek and Latin roots that I had been planning to do in this two-week period, but it’s only positive in that I did it ahead of schedule. Most of what I wanted to do will get done in my three-day weekend after Thanksgiving.
Earlier in the month, this article came across my feed:
https://www.greenevillesun.com/features/education/tusculum-university-launching-initiative-to-grow-academic-competition-teams/article_8fa2d9ae-a135-11ef-baee-5b6b2de4c52b.html
[Ergh….The problem we’re going to run into here is that it’s too late to look at this without a subscription.]
To summarize what’s behind the paywall now, Tusculum is organizing a connection between all of its academic competition teams, and connecting them with each other. And the organizing pole of this is Tusculum’s Quiz Bowl team coached by Chuck Pearson.
Now if you’ve never run across Chuck Pearson at a nationals, remedy that at your earliest opportunity. He’s managed to do what I originally set out to do in western Pennsylvania, only better and with fewer schools to draw from. He’s unified a quiz bowl circuit across states, across graduation from high school to college, and brought back alumni to help. And I have to admit I had never thought of this particular tack.
In the book I have written a section that asks you to survey your team’s experience in other competitions, because that sort of information is valuable to know as analogous experience. I have also written a section of the book detailing the notion of differentiating the hardware components of quiz bowl, knowing how to study, buzz with anticipation, work together, etc., from the software components, the study material, the categories, and tendencies of writers on the printed page. What I hadn’t done, and what this article had highlighted to me is that there’s a point in the middle section necessary where, after your television appearance, you as coach can interact with other coaches of activities at your school to cross-pollinate what you’ve learned to other teams and what they’ve learned to your team.
That makes sense to me as I’ve always seen quiz bowl as sort of a central transit point through which all academic competition competitors could pass through. A middle schooler who goes went through MathCounts, National Geographic Bee, or National Spelling Bee would find application of their knowledge in quiz bowl, and buzzer skill in quiz bowl would work in all other single subject competitions. But I kind of had a blindspot there, because I was considering competitions which were secondary competitors and tertiary competitors to quiz bowl as rivals on the school activity level, that would cause friction or conflict. What Tusculum’s doing is showing me that that conflict is not a necessity.