Remember how it felt when you first heard “Welcome to Level 1?” I often ask judges why they joined the program, and as a result, I’ve heard a number of humorous and inspiring stories. No matter how different each judge’s reasons and motivations have been, stories about achieving Level 1 typically share a similar response to the […]
Hello and welcome to the latest edition of the Feedbag! Last time, we covered the subject of review drafts. This month, our question is about how to help enable feedback when you’re in a leadership role: I’m team leading at an upcoming event, and I’d like to encourage my team to review each other. Do […]
Over the last couple of months we’ve explored the general value of introspection and self reviews. This value is one of the reasons that the Level 3 Advancement Process requires a comprehensive Self Review (in caps to distinguish it from normal self reviews). It’s important for L3s to be able to examine themselves honestly and […]
A lot of great stuff has been written about the feedback process, especially how to deliver it: Talk to the person first. Send a draft of the review in e-mail form. Balance the positive and negative feedback. Here’s the problem: these points are all centered on sparing the feelings of the person receiving the feedback. […]
You know how excited parents celebrate their children’s first tottering attempts at walking? How they ooh and ah and cheer and gasp and take dozens of pictures to post on social media? When I visited my parents recently, they did not cheer even though I walked quite well. Obviously my parents love me, but they […]
Hello and welcome to the sixth edition of the Feedbag! Last time, we covered the best approach for writing a tournament report about a tournament that had some tournament organizer trouble. This month, our topic will be drafts! No, not the kind that incinerate all your tickets on Magic Online! The kind that you write […]
You know, writing and judging really have a lot in common. That probably has something to do with why I enjoy both of them so much. One of those things, one that it took me an incredibly long time to get over, is that it’s hard to know how you’re doing unless someone else tells […]
Hello and welcome to the fifth installment of the Feedbag! Last time, we covered how to have a conversation with someone who has provided feedback you disagree with. Our question for this month comes to us from “PO’d by TO”: I’d like to write a tournament report, but my experience with the TO was […]
Self reviews are somehow simultaneously the easiest and hardest type of review. What makes them so, and how can you average those two sides out to find a happy medium? It’s common for newer judges to not even realize that writing a self review is a thing that they can do. With your first exposure […]
Welcome back to another edition of My First Review. Looking back on the first two reviews we’ve featured, I noticed that both were longer than a typical first review. While their length is by no means a bad thing, I don’t want to give judges the wrong idea of what to expect out of their […]