Week 96: Flashcards, Study Guides, Smolcats
I’ve been writing a set of flashcards for Catie’s school’s team, covering some of the same basic concepts that I’m writing about in the book, since middle school and high school televised have similar limitations on their content.
It strikes me that there’s really three paths for flashcards using online software, which I’ve broken into my own classification.
F0: Flash Cards with a single fact on them. One association: Vienna|Austria
F1: Flash Cards with a clue, and the last fact on them. Two associations: Ringstrasse, capital of Austria |Vienna
F2: Flash Cards that have the facts of a rudimentary question, phrased as a question. The Ringstrasse passes by the Palace of Justice, the Parliament and the State Opera buildings in what capital of Austria?|Vienna
F0 is easy to produce in bulk but it’s neither interesting nor really tied into either their curriculum or practice packets they’re working on. F1 is slightly better and ties into my ideas about last clues, which means they’re at least getting multiple associations on a single card. F2 is effectively simpler questions than practice tossups, but the production cost is several orders of magnitude over F0, and could end up being just the F1 card with some syntactic sugar.
So my questions to you the reader are:
1) Are all three types valid for teaching middle school students?
2) Are all three types valid for teaching high school students cramming for a single tournament?
3) Are F1 and F2 always destined to be duplicative efforts? Alternatively, are there enough people who learn facts in two pieces or three pieces, and enough people who would learn big chunks of connected facts, and then recognize one or two pieces of the whole?
4) Is F2 when compiled at the size of a couple thousand cards, potentially a public archive of television-show length questions, as discussed in Week 57?
If 4) is a yes, that poses the possibility of an interesting add-on to the book.
Another portion of the help I’ve been giving has been pointing them to publicly available study guides and in doing so, I was asked which of the You Gotta Know entries on NAQT’s website are appropriate for middle school use. I compiled a list of about 30, and that consideration led me to this list which answers the question: Are there any of the NAQT YGK’s applicable for televised quiz bowl?
Geography: Mountains, North American Rivers, Deserts
History: Explorers, Assassinations, Aviators, Treaties
Literature: African-American Authors, American Plays
Mythology: Greek Heroes, Greek Mythological Creatures, Norse Gods, Egyptian Gods
Religion: religious texts, founders of religions
Science: chemical elements, chemistry lab techniques, moons, organelles, rocks and minerals, scientific scales, space missions, types of computation problems(if your show has math problems)
Now not all of these lists are completely useful for television shows, but they have pieces that someone on the team should review before getting on stage.
As we ease into the long winter months, I’ve made a few investments in the future. First, I finally became so sick of the glitchy part of our internet connection that I invested in 5G home internet. For those of you who have worked with me over Zoom or similar this should be a remarkable improvement. It will take more trials with different software over the next few weeks, but I think this will allow me to read for distant tournaments without having the constant worry that my connection was going to crash.
My parents gave my wife and I our best anniversary gift this year, with a seed catalog. Since my office is still not even back to flex time, I’ve realized this year will probably be much like last year, with plenty of work from home days and plenty of lunch hours that could be devoted to weeding or harvesting. Over the past two weeks, we’ve chosen our crops for next spring, and how we’ll divide up the garden. I had commented last year that it’s different when you know you’ll be home, and you can plan out the entire year of gardening while the weather is miserable and cold. 2020 was a complete wreck for planning a garden, the ever stretching deadlines made it impossible to plan. 2021, while better on that front, still fell apart as I planned in the spring on a September return to work, meaning I could have planted more. This year, the best case is still 1-2 days a week in the office, which means every week through the year will have enough time for me to weed or harvest or whatever is needed.
For the final future investment, I’ve got a new secretary, she lives under my desk. Margaret (or Peggy) is a 13-year old smolcat, who lived in my aunt’s house for a decade. I say lived in the house rather than lived with my aunt because I don’t think she got the attention she deserved. This has left her a little starved for human affection, a little undersized, and a fierce pocket wildcat whenever any of her new neighbor cats pass by. After I finish this, I’m going to lay a blanket over this desk, so she can sleep all night next to her favorite spot in her new home, the register. Today she learned how to get on the desk and look out the window over the laptop. Expect her to be causing all manner of new typos in future newsletters.