Re: Quizbowl camp

• From: darwins_bulldog1138
• Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 02:20:56 -0700
• Message-ID: <000TCLPRO.00143VSSP.12170551-quizbowl_at_...>

<<I think the reason why many of us feel
revulsion at the idea of a quiz bowl "camp" is that it
might expose an embarrassing aspect of our game. We
like to believe that being good at quiz bowl means
being well read, but the unfortunate fact is that if
you're a beginning player, you actually will increase
your PPG by learning lists of Nobel Prize winners and
other "things that come up.">>

If you're a
beginning player on bad formats (in high school or
college). Good questions don't reward such inanity.
Certainly there are some "lists" that will help on NAQT or
ACF questions -- author-work and such -- but learning
those inculcates a deeper form of knowledge than Nobel
prize names-to-years does.

<<A couple of
people have suggested that the best way to prepare
people for quiz bowl in a camp would be to make them
write questions, but I disagree. Helping people to
write good quiz bowl questions is laudable, but if the
goal is to improve people's playing ability in a fixed
amount of time, it is much more efficient to make them
play on lots of questions and to quiz them on lists.
>>

Teaching people to write good questions will solve most of
the problems that quizbowl, particularly at the high
school level, has now. Teaching the process is not hard
or time-consuming, and once it is there, players can
write on their own. Short of knowledge that's brought
to the table of its own accord, writing questions is
the best way to learn. Self-perpetuating cycles can
be harnessed for good: 
Good questions are
written, good tournaments are held, players enjoy
themselves more, more people get involved, more good
tournaments are held, etc. And as an added bonus, teams can
attend packet-submission collegiate tournaments without
reinventing the wheel to their freshmen every year. How many
freshmen came into college programs this year knowing how
to write a good question? 10? 5? How many came in
from established high school programs? Maybe 50 or
more. Imagine if all of those people already knew how
to write, and needed only to scale the difficulty
level to a collegiate packet. It would lead to better
tournaements for everyone. Collegiate players should see that
they have a vested interest in promoting a
high-quality high school circuit.

--M.W.