Difficulty vs. expansion is always an issue with me. I tend to choose expansion, and by now I am satisfied with always tending to be on the difficult end of a submission tournament. People tend to give vague descriptions of what difficulties they want, anyways. I don't mind hard, as long as it is relatively diverse. I do mind difficulty without muliticulturalism and diversity, however. And some people write that way. Some sub-categories aren't really the best places for expansion, such as Renaissance artists and pre-20th century white males who wrote literature in the English language. I'd argue that we don't need canon expansion at all in those areas. I can give one example of a place where i would like to see canon expansion. That would be art history. But I want to see expansion in a different sense than most. I have taken multiple college courses in art history. To be quite honest, known creators and their named creations in Western art from the Renaissance or later probably account for less than half of what I learned or covered in class. Yet, it is the bulk of questions on art and architecture, probably because it is listable and therefore easy to acquire superficially. I've finally come upon my own way of dealing with the problem. One thing is that I do write questions on such things occasionally. I once had a fascination with writing questions on ancient Greco-Roman art, depite my avowed (and admittedly somewhat exaggerated for effect) distaste for classical civilization. I found that such art would fulfill that temporal-geographic portion of a well-distributed packet. On the other hand, art history clues can be used for other purposes than art questions. They will sneak into my history or religion questions often, for example. I could write a question on Persepolis by refering to the Apadana of Darius and Xerxes. I can describe a religious figure in terms of traditional iconography in art. I suppose some people will cringe and say that I am being interdisciplinary and somehow bad and wrong. I think what people should feel comfortable with are some tournaments where the stress is on accessibility, and some tournaments where the stress is on diverse topics. ACF Fall, I am told, stressed accessibility. ACF Nationals will probably stress a diversity of answers over accessibility. The question is which goal is more appropriate for which tournament. Accessibility is more important for tournaments intended for circuit-building. I think that ACF Fall, NAQT Sectionals, junior bird tournaments, and almost all non-national high school tournaments fall under that aegis. National tournaments, on the other hand, should want to opt more for a diverse and challenging set of answers appropriate to the level of the competitors. Other tournaments have to choose which category they want to fall into. I think that that isn't always clearly communicated in tournament announcements, and people go in with different expectations, none of which are met completely, resulting in a lot of complaints afterwards. No submission tournament has ever given me a clear indication of desired difficult. I can cite multiple tournament announcements which called for packets to be between NAQT SCT and ACF Regionals levels, which seems pretty open to me.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0: Sat 12 Feb 2022 12:30:45 AM EST EST