Week 320: What you take from practice
And implementing what we talked about in reading for practice
Continuing with our description of practice procedures, we have set up the inputs we have set up the basic procedure for practice. What we need to do in addition is create the for collecting information from practice and using it to improve future practices. We have to make a record of the evidence of practice. If you don’t take stock of what you did, it can be lost.
In a way this is similar to what we have to do when we chart the televised episodes. There we wanted to make sure that we not only were getting the answers but we were getting the types of answers and types of questions that were part of the distribution and habits of the writer. You want to be able to record your thoughts about how the players are doing on the questions, with some connection to the questions themselves either as side notes on a piece of paper or as a text file associated with what you are reading.
You will also want to give yourself a little bit of time after each practice session to add to your notes, and to review them. When we did chart packets as they appear on television we were doing it so that we could detect patterns in the ideas of writing. Here we're collecting the data specifically so that we can identify patterns in the knowledge of the team and more specifically patterns in their lack of knowledge.
The most important thing you can do in this is not only to identify answers or clues that are especially known by the team or unknown by the team, but to categorize that information. Whenever you are making a note of the particular answer, make sure your note also tells you a rough guess of category, and a rough guess of the types of information that are used as clues to reach that information.
Consider we read a packet in practice, And the following things happen:
The team gets a question on the Czech Republic after the capital is given as the last clue, but they don't get it on the first guess or are clearly letting it run to the end and it's a wild guess, they have no faith in it. It leads to a bonus on symphonies by various composers. Then there's RNA question and they don't do anything with it, But because this is practice we give them a bonus anyway and it's on national parks and they do well. 3rd toss up is on Dylan Thomas's Do Not Go Gentle into that good night, and what you notice about that question as you read it is all the quoted text from it. And that bonus goes into works of Charles Dickens.
So as you're reading through this, you're making notes on your copy of the packet in the margins:
— Czech. ← capital
— Symphonies
— RNA : biology?
— Yellowstone/Zion/Yosemite : national parks++
— Do not go gentle…←poems from passages
— Dickens works←works organized around authors
Not all the questions need to have notes, but as you see things you will begin to collect information. Each of these items represents a potential action plan for you to compile into a study guide or information to present to your team. These items tell you something about the distribution of questions in a packet choice of category or how writers like to use particular types of clues.
We knew from charting packets for television the capitals were an important last clue for questions where the answer is a nation. If you spend any time reading circuit questions you know that poetry questions are almost incapable of being written without some part of the original text of the poem being incorporated. Same with books and authors, or composers and their symphonies. Maybe you recognize that biology is a weak category for your team because all of your students are currently taking biology, and they just haven't gotten to the section on genetics and RNA yet. And maybe reason you saw your team smoke that national parks question is because that's how one of the players spends their summer vacations.
As I said each of these is a potential plan of action waiting to happen. The countries and capitals Study Guide, or the creator/creation notecard stacks may need to be reviewed again. You can remind your players that when they're reading a poem for English class that the words matter for quiz bowl. We may need to see in a month how we're doing on similar biology questions. That kid with all the national parks knowledge could be encouraged to some questions for the rest of the team to learn it better. But as you look at that you realize, that's a lot of work and you don't know which of those is exactly the best thing to start with.
What we want to do is figure out how to triage these potential actions. In order for us to do that we have to take multiple samples and that requires you to keep taking notes over a series of practices, and review them to spot frequencies of problems and when they stop being problems. This charting of your practice is not really a necessary step, but this is a systematization of something that happens to all coaches. You are sitting in the practice and you hear another clue and you see that it isn't having the same effect on your team as it is having for you. You remember last practice when there was a question that had a clue on capitals and you watch your team flail at it in the previous practice and in this practice. If you don't create a chain of evidence over the practices you are limited to your feelings and your memory about what is important. Without records of each practice that you can go back to, you cannot figure out how often a particular of clue is missed.
I wasn’t expecting to be one of the guinea pigs for the new livestreaming equipment, but I have to admit that it gave me the opportunity to demonstrate a couple of the finer points of moderating that I mentioned two weeks ago. Let's take the two pieces: the demonstration livestream, and the moderation guide, and see if I can improve one by observing the other.
Be Confident
You have to be able to compartmentalize your own mistakes. There’s at least five major trip ups I stumbled on and immediately recovered. If you don’t have faith in your own ability, those will eat at you. I’m perfectly fine with them eating at me now, but in the game that would have compounded mistakes and made more problems.
Balance Speed and Clarity
In that match I am trying very hard to keep that pace as fast as I can go, though there are points in there where I slow down because I am about to lose my place, or get tripped up (major part of that are sections where there’s boldface because it’s power, and lots of much less visible pronunciation guides, where I’m trying to hit my spots on sight reading) I didn’t want to lose a word in those sections.
Magnify
My biggest worry with the setup of those microphones and cameras was that I was going to blow up the speakers with my voice. I think I actually cheated the system by hanging the microphone over the right ear, when the proper way would have been to the left, and the microphone would have been tilted in slightly to catch more sound.
Time Your Breath
There was a tradeoff here: I was a little tired after reading 20 of the previous 21 rounds in the tournament, but those 20 rounds did allow me to get into the right rhythm of getting to the end of the sentence to take the breath at a natural pause.
My first round of the tournament, I only got through 19 questions because I didn’t have my breath right, and because the teams were taking the tossups to the full reading. The finals you saw was packed with first sentence powers, and I actually had a slightly different problem in being able to stop for a breath ahead of schedule. Sometimes that long pause after power is me figuring out if it’s power, and sometimes it’s me getting the breath back into my lungs after a hard stop.
Position Yourself to Project
You are not imagining that I am leaning back a little in my chair during the reading of the packet. I did that because the teams were in front of me and above me by about two feet. If I was upright or leaning forward in the chair, the bulk of my sound would have been directed against my laptop.
In the other axis, I was using the camera directly in front of me as a guide point to keep me facing between the two teams on tossups and to return to that position after the bonus concluded. You don’t necessarily need to do this when reading, returning to seeing the laptop screen should be enough, but having a small green LED in the lane between the teams is a nice advantage to have for a final.
The third trick in this was that in order to read from a distance, I did turn up magnification on the screen before reading (110% during the prelims, 120% in the finals.) It doesn’t need to be much, but it’s the same principle as teleprompters, if you’re focusing on something to read from in middle distance, it helps to have the text you’re reading from be a little larger than normal. Because I was in an elevated position on the stage, I didn’t have to worry about my tilted screen being read, so I was free to make it as visible as I needed.
Speak With Authority
This combines partly with the next section of the guide, but this is just using a variation of pilot voice to keep order in the game. There’s a more detailed discussion of this in Week 194, but it can be summarized as if it sounds like I’m in control of the situation, the players will be calmer in play, and focused on the game.
Be Assertive and Brief
Where I am saying more than the question, I am being very brief, the extra words I use are to crosscheck data with the other officials (which parts are correct, confirm power or not, etc.) The less I say off script, the more questions I can read.