Week 254: Home Confinement
And a stack of index cards, and cyber schools enter the fray of television.
Today was the coldest day of the year, either by calendar year, or since January 22, 2024. Like most of you, we've been in the grip of ‘capital W' Winter, and that's kept me from roaming too far from my home office. Aside from occasional shoveling or hauling a trash bag to the can, I've been confined to quarters for most of the past week.
That home confinement has been true for the schools as well. Snow knocked out Thursday of last week, which we discussed last Wednesday, and being too cold for snow to even happen knocked out Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week. Things have changed since I was a student (I can't ever remember a snow day only called due to temperature, unless the phrase "water main break" appeared.) So this has been a week of Chrome from Home for most students but the day seems to be done in a couple hours, and there's no room for activities in that schedule. So all my angst from last week got punted, and I was calm about it for the rest of the week. Nobody was getting ahead this week, unless you were prepping for the future…So I prepped for the future.
I got the things I wanted to do last week done at a leisurely pace. Over the weekend I activated the Kahoot! quizzes from last year, and scheduled them for a month's activity. I added three sets of flashcards to the quizlet sets, and I put study guides and simulated games together. And then I started prepping for a project I had thought of last year. You saw a little of this in Week 161:
https://dekidder.substack.com/p/week-161-the-madonna-through-point
And a little of this in Week 178:
https://dekidder.substack.com/p/week-178-refining-the-pitch-to-recruits
I have a lot of index cards like that one on Madonnas in paintings shown in 161, which were bound together by a small binder clip. When Andy (my dayjob boss mentioned in 248 https://dekidder.substack.com/p/week-248-on-retirement) retired in December, he left a stack of office supplies on his desk; I grabbed a 200 pack of index cards in that pile, because I intended to extend my stack of index cards. In a fit of synchronicity, my wife cleaned her home office and was about to throw away an empty index card container. And suddenly, with nothing to work on outside, I had a weekend project.
By Monday night, I had put 25 new cards in the stack, some from research I had done for the team and put in the drive, some from work I did for the first book, and some from items I wrote and stored on the first book's facebook page. And now I needed the box to store them as the binder clip was strained.
An aside on the facebook page: I wrote about 40 "things that didn't make it into the book" on that page, and I've had some of it disappear from my thumb drives over the years. So I was starting to worry about having that material in a second location, and I was also having the feeling that I'd better get it in a place where if someone decided they'd had enough with another social media platform and set their Facebook visibility to zero, they'd have a second vault to turn to.
Each of these cards is enough to study the subject of a question for quiz bowl, and it's enough to write a question, with some mild research to formulate a good leadin or first sentence. My thought with this now in a larger stack, is that it's becoming enough cards to create a set of questions by simply pulling cards and returning them to the back of the stack. With enough cards, you could always have inspiration for a question to defeat writer’s block. Or to write questions for practice tailored for the level you’re going to next face.
And with the free time I had left over, I started charting the games that aired since my last session. The chief noticeable thing I found in this set of episodes was the first appearance (that I can remember) of a cyber school on the TV program. Reach Cyber School competed two weeks ago, and aside from clearly recording from four different locations, they weren't any different from other schools. Maybe a little younger, (all?) freshmen in the lineup, but that’s a thing you notice that when your first run started with three in grade 10. And having seen that, and how teams form at cyber schools in other places, I started considering how they managed to even get on the show.
They'd have needed an advocate to get on the show, not necessarily from the school but willing to do the work, and they'd need to work with the producer to get them on and set up four zoom connections, with appropriate school backgrounds and the like. And as I worked through the hoops they'd have to go through, there were two things that were clear:
- They won't be the last one to get on as long as this format is virtual, the feasibility is proven. And there's at least a couple dozen cyber schools in the area.
- Suddenly there was a missing chapter to be written for the book.
And so I thought out the things that Reach had to do to get here that I didn't.
Recruit
Elevate a coach
Arrange for practice time and virtual space
Communicate with the recruits
Organize material for practices
These pieces aren't difficult, but they are different. (I'll fill in the structure of this for a chapter in the book, not here.) Since you have reduced interpersonal contact, and you have to organize an activity within the communications of the school, there's really no way this could be organized without either a strongly motivated coach, or strongly motivated founding players.
One final note about the cold week. If they had planned on taping any episodes this week, those had to have been scratched. So as bad as I felt in bowing out, I know we were just one of many problems they faced this month.