Re: [quizbowl] Re: Clemson tournament proposal (something a little different)

<<Why can't current events be part of an academic
tournament?  Isn't it just as important to know what's
going on in the world today in an academic setting as
it is to know what happened 200 or 2000 years ago?  I
agree that there is a considerable amount of trash
(i.e.  sports and music, etc.) in NAQT packets, that
maybe is excessive, but I see nothing wrong with
current events as academic knowledge. 
>>

I definitely agree with this. I think that the
distaste for current events expressed by some purists
is rooted in the fact that current events has never
been written well, and certain teams and organizations
continue to pass off questions about "trash that
happened recently" as current events.

If more people learn to limit CE to important,
memorable events in American and world politics rather
than stuffing it with business, crime, and trash
questions, perhaps we could have a happy medium. Part
of the way to do this is to tone down the CE
distribution to no more than 2 or 3 questions per
match, simply because there aren't enough answerable,
academically solid current events to write more than
that when the distribution is multiplied by a whole
year's worth of packets. Another helpful behavior is
to be strict about the academic nature of CE and move
all trash questions to trash, all questions on recent
studies of penguin behavior to general knowledge, and
all questions on crimes-of-the-week to oblivion.

--M.W.

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your site
http://webhosting.yahoo.com

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0: Sat 12 Feb 2022 12:30:46 AM EST EST