Week 30: The Hermetic Knowledge of Televised Quiz Bowl
OR, Rampant speculation turned into draft of a chapter with a hilariously overblown title for book two.
I started asking the question last week, and though we're nowhere near enough data, nobody has flat out shot down my hypothesis.
The question I asked:
“Polling my facebook friends, specifically those with students in high school or recently graduated:
Prior to COVID, were the following objects visible in a classroom in their school?
- A US map
- A world map or globe.
- A periodic table.
- A poster showing the US presidents in order.
- A poster showing the planets or constellations.
I'm trying to get a sense of universality of these being visible, even if not included in lessons.”
What I was trying to collect data on was the decline of certain non-curriculum teaching materials over time. These objects are all kind of background media in a classroom. They aren't necessarily part of the lesson plan, but they aid learning when the student's focus isn't on the lesson. These background pieces of information allow the observant student to learn more, even when not engaged in class. All of these can end up online on webpages accessible in the classroom, but once they are online, the impetus to encounter them is on the student.
And yes, I now have to follow up with those who volunteered information and ask the same question of their time in school to help figure out the time dependency.
One of the theories I'm trying to test out for the second book is that quiz bowl (and academic and trivia competitions in general) maintain many characteristics with the eras that they begin to break from other forms of competition. The quirks of a format are baked in in its early years. After those early years, there's a certain established style that maintains a repeatable product. In other words, all formats have a distinct founder effect.
In the specific case of televised quiz bowl competitions, because their origins are prior to the World Wide Web, their distribution, clue selection, and their writers' idiosyncrasies reflect an origin from non-web sources. If we can figure out what that environment was like, what sources would inspire them, we can gain an insight into the questions they would continuously produce, and why they produce them. Since we know that the idea of a category distribution is missing in televised quiz bowl, or along completely different categories than what we are used to, this gives us an alternative framework to predict the product of writers and editors.
All of these items could have appeared in a classroom anywhere from the 1940's to 1995. And their existence could have stuck in the minds of observant, creative, knowledge hungry students, who would later turn those tendencies into writing. And that is why I chose to ask about them.
From most universal to least, I expected the order to be:
Periodic Table
US map
World map
Globe
Presidents
Planets
Constellations
The periodic table was a given: If a school taught chemistry, and as far as I know that's close to a universal in high school, then they will have a periodic table hung in the chemistry lab. Maps were second because they can be installed to roll up like a projection screen, and if they are, they are permanent additions to whatever classroom they are in, even if the map becomes out of date. Globes would be less likely because they would be more likely to take damage than maps and are more expensive to replace when they need to be update, so they're less likely to be placed in a classroom.
Planets and constellation posters were what I figured to be least likely. Because astronomy is likely to be covered in a class with earth science, if it's covered in class at all, there's less likelihood of posters of them being seen as good decoration for a classroom. There are also other space themes that can be used in classroom decorations, and older times would have had posters that related to manned space flight. This was sort of my control question, if this was anything other than last, I would know I was missing an important factor.
The thing I was most curious about, because I figured it to have the biggest shift between my time in high school and today, were posters of the US Presidents in chronological order. In the 80's one could find these posters in every social studies room, and every history classroom, and most other types of homeroom; today they seem to be a rarity.
- Unlike the other items in the list, the most frequent form that this poster of presidents took was as the top half of a business promotional calendar. In my area, banks, insurance agents, unions, and civic organizations used this motif freely in posters and calendars, as it was easily reproduced, and nearly public domain. The educational content of them enabled advertisers to get some level of awareness within schools, but this could be given away to any person or business as early cheap swag. So these did not come from the same sort of educational supply chain as maps or periodic tables.
- The wall calendar that was the primary form factor of these was usually a tear-away monthly calendar or a full year calendar. A full year calendar would just be covered up by another poster after the year ended, or a tear-away calendar would see something new posted over that portion of the calendar. Once the poster was partially covered, it became harder to remove it from the wall, which kept the presidents and the advertisement visible. This also served to work in its favor, the poster only needed to be replaced every 4 or 8 years, by that point it became part of the background information of the classroom. I remember one poster/calendar in school which ended with Carter, still up well into the first Bush administration.
- A couple people suggested that political polarization and opposition to recognizing the president in power might have led to this being less popular over time. (opposition to both George W. Bush and Barack Obama were cited) While I grant that is a possibility, and it may be proven out, I think that the downward trend was well in place before either took office.
- Because the wall calendars with presidents weren't the planner type, with large amounts of space to write daily details, they fell out of favor once more effective calendars were available. This includes daily planners, dry eraseable calendars, and especially anything on a computer. Company swag has also moved on from the free calendar.
- Another factor that changed between then and now was the democratization of printing. The era prior to easy access to copiers and printers meant that there were fewer designs of educational appropriate material which could hang in a classroom, and you had to go to a print shop to produce products. Once you are able to have a greater variety of posters for purchase, or images to print out, any particular design from the previous era is likely to have a decline in its use.
So what do these have to do with televised quiz bowl?
In televised quiz bowl all of these objects correspond to specific classes of answers which are used frequently because they can uniquely identify an answer very quickly, for the question's last few words.
Countries: what nation ruled from [x]
Capitals: Name this capital of [x].
Chemical elements: Name this element with atomic number [n] and symbol [x].
Presidents: Who is this [n]th president?
Planets: on what [n]th planet from the Sun?
A good number of these phrases, the ones that deal with ordering, don't exist either in classroom lessons, or in circuit quiz bowl. They are a construct of televised quiz bowl, using a shorthand that fits uniquely identifying information into a cipher to be decoded, like a mental lookup table. Nobody really thinks of Eisenhower as the 34th president, or learns it in that way in the classroom. But the secret key to those questions existed on the classroom walls and posters, hidden in plain sight, hermetic knowledge useless until it pops up in televised competition.
This mental lookup table is really an encoding of the information, and while it makes for one-to-one relationships for clues and answers, it does divorce meaning of the other clues of the question from their answer. Circuit quiz bowl eschews constructions which encode information so the answer can simply be ticked off of a data table. But that also means that clues must be longer, and connect in sequence with each other and to the answer, rather than allowing one clue of rote memorization of distantly related data to dominate competition.
Another small reason why these types of clues are eschewed in circuit quiz bowl is the location of competitions: A television studio vs a classroom. If a round is held in a classroom, say a chemistry lab/classroom, the periodic table is visible to both teams. Circuit quiz bowl quickly realized that this can alter the difficulty of science questions in that room, introducing a potential unfairness. Circuit quiz bowl can't really avoid this in classrooms, when someone's book report is put on a wall as decoration, it's possible that same book is going to be an answer in that room. But things like periodic tables are both frequent enough subjects and obvious enough hazards that the circuit has tuned its questions to avoid the problem.
So my modified hypothesis:
Televised quiz bowl competition rewards observation of things outside of the curriculum.
and the untested second part:
Circuit quiz bowl competition rewards observation of previously written questions.
One final thing...
The reason I find this focus on background information interesting is that because COVID-19 moved students from the classroom to the online meeting, there's much less background information in students' lives now. If distance learning becomes the norm, background information will take a new form, the first fundamental shift we've seen since the internet entered the classroom.
Nothing else this week. I hope you enjoyed it. This was a really big ball of speculating out loud about why certain things matter, and how it can be used to the advantage of a clever coach or player. But it's going to require more data, a lot more sharpening, and a lot more editing. But once polished it gives us an insight into why competitions are the way they are, and how we can use their nature to improve performance in the competition.