Paul Tomlinson sez: "For example, while high school students may have heard of Picasso and Dali, they are much less likely to know Spanish artists like Goya, El Greco, or Velazquez. " " The same sort of parallel can be made between Socrates and Husserl. Or the Thirty Years War and the War of Jenkin's Ear. " Ok, this is me speaking as someone who's written several high school tournaments over the past few years and played in many, many more... El Greco, Goya, and Velazquez are all easy answers for decent teams given clues involving such things as "View of Toledo" artist born in Crete, artist of "Disasters of War" including "3rd of May, 1808, or Spanish court painter of "Las Meninas," or "the Maids of Honor." Husserl is definitely harder for HS kids (I probably wouldn't have known him back then), but he could still be part of a bonus with the clue being something about phenomenology and _Logical Investigations_, and philosophers somewhat akin to Husserl and influenced by him, like Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus, come up rather often at HS tournaments. Kids learn next to nothing about art, music, philosophy, and (in most cases) literature in high school, but if they work at that stuff , they can get pretty good pretty fast by listening to question after question at practice and/or by memorizing lists of titles and authors/composers/artists at home. You want the questions gettable, but don't tailor them to the lowest common denominator. Questions should be challenging; players aren't going to get any better by hearing "Spanish artist" and thinking it's got to be either Picasso or Dali. Bad teams tend to do poorly whether the questions are hard or easy, and questions that are very, very easy can insult good teams and players. When I write for HS (this can be applied to college, too, though there are fewer _bad_ teams in college, just young ones), I write for the good teams; I don't really care about the bad ones--they'll always suck unless they put effort into it. Most are content to suck, so why should I change anything? The ones that aren't happy about their current situation tend to try to get better. Hard work and overall good play should be rewarded, not slothfulness and ignorance. Mike Wehrman
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