The Big Vision: [3] Rooting out the "Eh, who cares" attitude
Posted: Sat Aug 30, 2014 6:22 pm
This thread is part of the "The Big Vision" series. Click here to go back to index/introduction.
Having Serious Fun
Rooting out the "unofficial" / "Eh, who cares" aesthetic, and its harmful effects
(i.e. taking required logistics seriously and having fun aren’t actually opposites!)
There’s a long-running streak within the quizbowl psyche, perhaps because of its insular history, which sees it "at heart" as a game run by amateurs, for amateurs. It’s a deeply-held idea in many corners that since nobody outside quizbowl could possibly care about it and nobody’s looking, the logistics and external trappings of decent planning don’t really matter, so long as the questions are good and the small circle of super-invested editors put in the minimal amount of effort to keep proceedings running. [This is far more true of the college level than the high school level, and varies a lot from circuit to circuit, so I don’t mean to accuse any of the circuits which regularly do do better on this front of falling into all of these traps. But it can definitely pop up anywhere, say, when a college team runs a lackadaisical event in an area where high school teams take things seriously.]
Jeff Siegel’s Slate article evokes it well: There’s a sort of fetishizing/idealizing of the “unofficial” / “seat-of-our-pants” aesthetic in this game. Such an attitude is certainly a bug, not a feature (or, at minimum, the sort of thing which we don’t have to keep doing forever into the future just because it’s loomed large in our past and present). And it causes many real problems. Some examples: Teams often show up late without excuse just because they’ve never been penalized for it. Question sets are routinely written at the absolute last minute, allowing little time to catch proofreading errors or to ensure grammatical coherence. Tournament hosts might devise a schedule on the fly rather than printing out copies or putting it up on the projector, or input stats at a disorganized table in the hall. TDs often waffle over what to do in front of teams rather than making hard fast decisions in a separate control room. Last minute drops/cancellations at every level -- individual, team, tournament, set -- bespeak an attitude of throwing one’s arms up and just going ‘eh, it’s quizbowl, no one can make me commit do anything.’ In an interesting sociological twist, many of the best quizbowl players have never bothered to read the official rules of the tournaments they play in! Some championship-caliber teams still do things like lodge disallowed protests or make mistaken timing calls on tossup answers or prompts.
It’s by no means inherent to the game or the people who play it that “quizbowl people” are (as the in-game stereotypes often have it) always late, somewhat bumbling, uninterested in putting on a smooth event in favor of petty bickering over pizza orders, questionably hygienic, etc. In fact, it’s a disservice to paying teams to assume that every attending team cares as little about organization as the “cool kids” who are only in it for the questions. All of the major “acronym” quizbowl organizations (NAQT, NHBB, ACF, PACE, HSAPQ) have now gotten their acts together to lead by example on this front, running national championships which take logistics as seriously as the question content.
What’s more, there is a growing number of people for whom this game actually has to run well, since it’s earning them a living. I can now count on two hands the number of people who make quizbowl their job on a serious full-time or almost-full-time basis (R Hentzel, Jeff Hoppes, Seth Teitler, Chad Kubicek, Matt Weiner, Eric Huff, Nick Clusserath, Dave Madden, Nolwenn Madden -- am I missing anyone?). That number will grow, and that’s not factoring in people who effectively make quizbowl their second job by getting coaching stipends, working as an editor for a big question-writing operation, etc. Insistence that quizbowl can’t help but be disorganized, apologism for hazy and lazily-enforced rules, peals that “it’s all for fun, maaaaan” in the face of logistical breakdowns, slap bowl rooms, and the like are flat-out insulting to the efforts those people put in day in and day out.
And it will only become more important to get this right in the near future.To be quite frank about the brave new world we’re entering: We’re starting to see a growing amount of parental/familial interest in quizbowl at the middle and high school levels. I helped run the info desk at the 2014 PACE NSC, at which at least three dozen distinct parents must have accompanied their kids’ teams to the tournament (way up from when I was in high school). Parents are even more of a presence, I’m told, at middle school events such as MSNCT and the Middle School History Bee. Involved parents can be FIERCE about ensuring that their kids’ experiences are consistently excellent, and many simply won’t tolerate low standards in the running of events. In extreme situations, some are willing to voice their discontent, challenging TDs’ authority to keep events running. Being able to impress such people with well-run events, and being able deal with such people by staying firm in rough situations, is going to be non-optional in every circuit very shortly. To get back to the issue of outside support, which is what so much of this improvement project is geared towards: It’s increasingly the rule, not the exception, that spectators such as parents are there to chaperone their kids and see events unfolding firsthand. The outsiders are here now -- will they see an activity which they can respect?
Relatedly: We as a community can do a lot more to help new tournament directors, rather than assuming they’ll figure everything out from scratch on their own. I don’t want to look like I’m blaming inexperienced TDs for the mere fact of their inexperience -- I’m casting this particular stone at people who know better. The “design patterns” of tournament directing success should be made much more widely available. It takes minimal effort to print the schedule out or project it on a wall/screen. It’s not as easy for many coaches to learn the principles of fair scheduling for various numbers of teams, and why those principles exist, or to learn the nuances of protest resolution. It would be good to see more guidance and more resources available which people can look at (see Part 5 for more on this).
What’s more, good logistics are themselves an outreach tactic and need to be seen as such. Marginal teams are more likely to return to specific tournaments where they were treated well and given many efficient games without hassle or delay. Teams marginal to quizbowl as a whole are less likely to see the activity as worth their while when 10-round tournaments run until 7 PM or moderators don’t know what they’re doing. If all those teams erode, you’re left only with the “top tier” types who’d be there no matter what -- a bad situation for the game’s future health. The make-up-a-schedule-on-the-fly-and-draw-it-on-the-chalkboard days are over. It’s time to take the task of replacing them seriously.
This is not to say that there can’t be people who play quizbowl just ‘for fun,’ or who choose not to make a serious program of studying to get better a part of their time in the game. It is only to say that people should be free to set their own level of involvement and dedication in an environment of well-run, professional-looking tournaments on well-written intelligible questions, instead of sloppily-organized tournaments which assume that insiders care enough to stick around and aren’t concerned with non-insiders at all. In fact, we are far more likely to be able to cater to people who are less serious about improving when our events are appealing.
So: Learn the rules. If you’re running a non-NAQT set, know which rule set you’re using for the day. Finish your sets well before their first use -- ideally, make sure every question is written at least a week in advance, so you can do a final proofreading and placement of questions into packets. Enforce eligibility rules consistently. Treat teams fairly. Remember that your behavior reflects not just on yourself, but on your school and other quizbowl affiliations as well.
If time and resources permit you to add more “bells and whistles” to your tournament to make it look more official, such as an opening PowerPoint, a light breakfast, name tags, etc. -- go for it. There's no reason why well-run tournaments can't also look pretty, and once the logistical basics are in place, I see little sense in the 'traditional' quizbowl attitudes against such niceties. That said, used-book prizes are such an embedded part of our culture, and such an elegant statement of what the game is about, that I’d hate to see them go. Frankly, I prefer them to the small statuettes that NAQT’s championships give out.
A pervasive attitude of defeatism (mentioned in Part 1) often goes hand-in-hand with this sort of ‘anti-establishment’ streak. People who say “oh well, quizbowl tournaments have always been disorganized and people always show up late in the past -- I guess they always will” are very much an obstacle to breaking some of these vicious cycles. Instead of continuing to reinforce stereotypes, do your best to do one better. I assure you, teams at your events will notice if you go an extra ways to make your questions, logistics, etc. better than average. And as “average” rises to the level it needs to be at, and tournaments which look especially well-run today become the norm, teams will be more generally satisfied and likely to want to attend a full schedule of tournaments a year.
In the future, think about this little test when putting together an official quizbowl event: Say some outsider does swing by your tournament with 10,000 dollars in a bag, saying that if the tournament looks like it’s worthwhile to support, the TD’s organization can take the dollars and use them to promote quizbowl in their area however the TD sees fit. Wouldn’t we want to put on as good a show in that case? If it meant hundreds more dollars in our own pockets each year for tournaments that draw more interest, summed across multiple years, suddenly that absurd fictional scenario seems slightly more real.
While we’re at it, let’s make that prospect even less hypothetical in Part Four, shall we?
Having Serious Fun
Rooting out the "unofficial" / "Eh, who cares" aesthetic, and its harmful effects
(i.e. taking required logistics seriously and having fun aren’t actually opposites!)
There’s a long-running streak within the quizbowl psyche, perhaps because of its insular history, which sees it "at heart" as a game run by amateurs, for amateurs. It’s a deeply-held idea in many corners that since nobody outside quizbowl could possibly care about it and nobody’s looking, the logistics and external trappings of decent planning don’t really matter, so long as the questions are good and the small circle of super-invested editors put in the minimal amount of effort to keep proceedings running. [This is far more true of the college level than the high school level, and varies a lot from circuit to circuit, so I don’t mean to accuse any of the circuits which regularly do do better on this front of falling into all of these traps. But it can definitely pop up anywhere, say, when a college team runs a lackadaisical event in an area where high school teams take things seriously.]
Jeff Siegel’s Slate article evokes it well: There’s a sort of fetishizing/idealizing of the “unofficial” / “seat-of-our-pants” aesthetic in this game. Such an attitude is certainly a bug, not a feature (or, at minimum, the sort of thing which we don’t have to keep doing forever into the future just because it’s loomed large in our past and present). And it causes many real problems. Some examples: Teams often show up late without excuse just because they’ve never been penalized for it. Question sets are routinely written at the absolute last minute, allowing little time to catch proofreading errors or to ensure grammatical coherence. Tournament hosts might devise a schedule on the fly rather than printing out copies or putting it up on the projector, or input stats at a disorganized table in the hall. TDs often waffle over what to do in front of teams rather than making hard fast decisions in a separate control room. Last minute drops/cancellations at every level -- individual, team, tournament, set -- bespeak an attitude of throwing one’s arms up and just going ‘eh, it’s quizbowl, no one can make me commit do anything.’ In an interesting sociological twist, many of the best quizbowl players have never bothered to read the official rules of the tournaments they play in! Some championship-caliber teams still do things like lodge disallowed protests or make mistaken timing calls on tossup answers or prompts.
It’s by no means inherent to the game or the people who play it that “quizbowl people” are (as the in-game stereotypes often have it) always late, somewhat bumbling, uninterested in putting on a smooth event in favor of petty bickering over pizza orders, questionably hygienic, etc. In fact, it’s a disservice to paying teams to assume that every attending team cares as little about organization as the “cool kids” who are only in it for the questions. All of the major “acronym” quizbowl organizations (NAQT, NHBB, ACF, PACE, HSAPQ) have now gotten their acts together to lead by example on this front, running national championships which take logistics as seriously as the question content.
What’s more, there is a growing number of people for whom this game actually has to run well, since it’s earning them a living. I can now count on two hands the number of people who make quizbowl their job on a serious full-time or almost-full-time basis (R Hentzel, Jeff Hoppes, Seth Teitler, Chad Kubicek, Matt Weiner, Eric Huff, Nick Clusserath, Dave Madden, Nolwenn Madden -- am I missing anyone?). That number will grow, and that’s not factoring in people who effectively make quizbowl their second job by getting coaching stipends, working as an editor for a big question-writing operation, etc. Insistence that quizbowl can’t help but be disorganized, apologism for hazy and lazily-enforced rules, peals that “it’s all for fun, maaaaan” in the face of logistical breakdowns, slap bowl rooms, and the like are flat-out insulting to the efforts those people put in day in and day out.
And it will only become more important to get this right in the near future.To be quite frank about the brave new world we’re entering: We’re starting to see a growing amount of parental/familial interest in quizbowl at the middle and high school levels. I helped run the info desk at the 2014 PACE NSC, at which at least three dozen distinct parents must have accompanied their kids’ teams to the tournament (way up from when I was in high school). Parents are even more of a presence, I’m told, at middle school events such as MSNCT and the Middle School History Bee. Involved parents can be FIERCE about ensuring that their kids’ experiences are consistently excellent, and many simply won’t tolerate low standards in the running of events. In extreme situations, some are willing to voice their discontent, challenging TDs’ authority to keep events running. Being able to impress such people with well-run events, and being able deal with such people by staying firm in rough situations, is going to be non-optional in every circuit very shortly. To get back to the issue of outside support, which is what so much of this improvement project is geared towards: It’s increasingly the rule, not the exception, that spectators such as parents are there to chaperone their kids and see events unfolding firsthand. The outsiders are here now -- will they see an activity which they can respect?
Relatedly: We as a community can do a lot more to help new tournament directors, rather than assuming they’ll figure everything out from scratch on their own. I don’t want to look like I’m blaming inexperienced TDs for the mere fact of their inexperience -- I’m casting this particular stone at people who know better. The “design patterns” of tournament directing success should be made much more widely available. It takes minimal effort to print the schedule out or project it on a wall/screen. It’s not as easy for many coaches to learn the principles of fair scheduling for various numbers of teams, and why those principles exist, or to learn the nuances of protest resolution. It would be good to see more guidance and more resources available which people can look at (see Part 5 for more on this).
What’s more, good logistics are themselves an outreach tactic and need to be seen as such. Marginal teams are more likely to return to specific tournaments where they were treated well and given many efficient games without hassle or delay. Teams marginal to quizbowl as a whole are less likely to see the activity as worth their while when 10-round tournaments run until 7 PM or moderators don’t know what they’re doing. If all those teams erode, you’re left only with the “top tier” types who’d be there no matter what -- a bad situation for the game’s future health. The make-up-a-schedule-on-the-fly-and-draw-it-on-the-chalkboard days are over. It’s time to take the task of replacing them seriously.
This is not to say that there can’t be people who play quizbowl just ‘for fun,’ or who choose not to make a serious program of studying to get better a part of their time in the game. It is only to say that people should be free to set their own level of involvement and dedication in an environment of well-run, professional-looking tournaments on well-written intelligible questions, instead of sloppily-organized tournaments which assume that insiders care enough to stick around and aren’t concerned with non-insiders at all. In fact, we are far more likely to be able to cater to people who are less serious about improving when our events are appealing.
So: Learn the rules. If you’re running a non-NAQT set, know which rule set you’re using for the day. Finish your sets well before their first use -- ideally, make sure every question is written at least a week in advance, so you can do a final proofreading and placement of questions into packets. Enforce eligibility rules consistently. Treat teams fairly. Remember that your behavior reflects not just on yourself, but on your school and other quizbowl affiliations as well.
If time and resources permit you to add more “bells and whistles” to your tournament to make it look more official, such as an opening PowerPoint, a light breakfast, name tags, etc. -- go for it. There's no reason why well-run tournaments can't also look pretty, and once the logistical basics are in place, I see little sense in the 'traditional' quizbowl attitudes against such niceties. That said, used-book prizes are such an embedded part of our culture, and such an elegant statement of what the game is about, that I’d hate to see them go. Frankly, I prefer them to the small statuettes that NAQT’s championships give out.
A pervasive attitude of defeatism (mentioned in Part 1) often goes hand-in-hand with this sort of ‘anti-establishment’ streak. People who say “oh well, quizbowl tournaments have always been disorganized and people always show up late in the past -- I guess they always will” are very much an obstacle to breaking some of these vicious cycles. Instead of continuing to reinforce stereotypes, do your best to do one better. I assure you, teams at your events will notice if you go an extra ways to make your questions, logistics, etc. better than average. And as “average” rises to the level it needs to be at, and tournaments which look especially well-run today become the norm, teams will be more generally satisfied and likely to want to attend a full schedule of tournaments a year.
In the future, think about this little test when putting together an official quizbowl event: Say some outsider does swing by your tournament with 10,000 dollars in a bag, saying that if the tournament looks like it’s worthwhile to support, the TD’s organization can take the dollars and use them to promote quizbowl in their area however the TD sees fit. Wouldn’t we want to put on as good a show in that case? If it meant hundreds more dollars in our own pockets each year for tournaments that draw more interest, summed across multiple years, suddenly that absurd fictional scenario seems slightly more real.
While we’re at it, let’s make that prospect even less hypothetical in Part Four, shall we?