kitchen table math, the sequel: MathCounts

Thursday, October 16, 2008

MathCounts

Has anyone been through the MathCounts competition for middle school? Any comments? I've been asked to do it at our school.
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11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Steve,

We did it at our school last year for the first time. I thought it was a good thing. They're supposed to do it again this year.

I wish we had someone like you to teach our kids. The schools with math people coaching are at a distinct advantage.

The problems are pretty tough even for smart middle-schoolers.

Our teacher handed out the practice sheets and I think a number of kids were intimidated by their inability to finish them. The few that stuck it out went and had a good time.

You have a 4 man team, I believe, and then 4 individuals you can take--total possible would be 8. The team should be your best with the individuals being like alternates. However, even if you don't have enough for a team, you can take individuals (that's what we did) and they still have a problem at the end that they work on together.

The competition is pretty fierce which is why a lot of schools don't like it. The winners seem to be heavily coached and not many awards are given, so the vast majority of kids attending only walk away with a certificate. THat's fine, but it's good if they know that going in.

I will also add that my then 7th grader's ACT math score jumped up to a 29 after spending months working on those problems. I had actually prepped him more for the fall one. I can't help but wonder if some of the Mathcounts problem solving helped him.

We'll be doing it this year, too.

SusanS

October 16, 2008 at 1:37 PM
SteveH said...

Thanks for the feedback Susan.

I looked at some of the sample problems on the web site and thought they looked like real math. I think that it will be a stretch for most kids. It's a little irritating, however, because they seem to expect kids to solve certain problems by "thinking". This appears to be the case for their non-standard combination and permutation problems. My philosophy, however, is to first teach the math and tell them to let the math do the thinking.

I would hope that kids would feel like winners if they see their math grades go up. This would require me to get more than the math brains to take part. It also raises an interesting question. If our school does well at the competition, does that mean they will think that Everyday Math is just fine?

October 16, 2008 at 7:45 PM
Anonymous said...

It seemed that a lot of the problems were a stretch for our kids and there was no teacher on your level to help them, so they just flailed along for months.

The one child who seemed to be finishing the sheets every week had an engineer father at home. We were surprised when he had the weakest showing at the event.

Still, our kids were very excited about how many schools were there just to do math. Since there are very few winners of anything at Mathcounts, the kids all seemed fine with just spending the morning working problems and eating snacks and a box lunch. The atmosphere was almost festive.

Our sponsor is not the competition type and was very wary of it (as was the administration.) But when we went and she saw how the Mathcounts people handled it, she felt better about the whole thing. We just kept stressing the experience they were getting and that this was their first time (since we knew they were going to get blown out by the gifted and math schools.)

I believe when you sign up you get a big packet with a lot of teacher/student help and practice sheets which helped our sponsor a lot. Still, I wish we could get some math parent in to help more.

SusanS

October 17, 2008 at 5:42 AM
SteveH said...

I love to solve problems, but I don't see math in any kind of competitive way. In the real world, math and engineering may be competitive, but not on an hour, day, or week basis. The problems are much more complex, and taking the time to find the right solution (and path to get there) can make all of the difference.

Often, the competition will show up in the technical journals. Two groups will be taking different approaches to the same problem, and it may take years to see which approach will dominate. Everyone wants to write the technical paper that will be referenced by everyone else. This has little to do with whether you can solve a word problem in 15 minutes. You don't want to be fast, but working on the wrong solution.

October 17, 2008 at 6:47 AM
VickyS said...

Steve, are you planning on coaching a MathCounts team this year? I ask because I am coaching a team this year. I, too, have never seen or been to a MathCounts competition but I wanted my son to have the opportunity to participate so the school is allowing me to organize a team (thanks, Susan, for your insights).

I coached 5th and 6th grade competition teams last year in a similar competition when my son was in 6th grade.

Many of the questions, in that competition and in the MathCounts competition materials I now have, do seem to be "reformish"--plenty of guess and check, or making a table looking for patterns, for example. But there seem to be at least as many decent problems.

Also, both competitions have a sizable amount of group problem solving. Interestingly, I had two girls at my first meeting who told me in no uncertain terms that they could NOT solve problems on their own and so were only interested if they would be on the group problem solving events. They really believe they cannot do math by themselves and, maybe they can't. There is so much group work now I believe a kid could fall into that pretty easily.

October 17, 2008 at 9:01 PM
SteveH said...

Thanks Vicky.

Does the school let you do everything, even going to the competition by yourself, or do you have to work with a teacher? How often do you meet?

My reaction to the sample problems was the same as yours, but I think I can get the kids to use algebra for many problems, rather than tables or guessing. My goal is to organize the problems so that the kids think less, rather than more.

As for group work, will you require them to work alone on some problems? Will you give them homework?

What does the school think about the contests? I think our school feels that it is a form of differentiated instruction. It allows them (at some level) to avoid dealing with curriculum problems. If parents want more, then they are offered MathCounts.

October 18, 2008 at 4:38 AM
VickyS said...

The school lets me do everything for the math competitions, from ordering (and paying for!) the materials, to selecting the team, organizing the practices, and attending the competition. This is not because they are uninterested but because their teachers are so overworked already that they don't have the time/energy for this. It is a charter school and I believe all the teachers are already at 1.2 (handling an extra class). If I didn't do the math competitions, they wouldn't happen.

The math teacher works with me to promote the activity and I share the materials and results with her.

The parents love it.

For MathCounts I plan on meeting once a week for 45 minutes which isn't enough but there are scheduling issues for both them and me. I would prefer to meet twice a week for an hour or so. The competitions are in Jan/Feb and it's been a little hard to drum up interest in a "club" format with the competition so far away.

The school tries to differentiate through placement decisions (instead of 4th-8th grade math classes, they call them Math A, B, 1, 2, 3 and 3+). The math competition is purely extracurricular and I guess you would call it enrichment although I do a lot of teaching.

Like last year, I plan to give the kids equal time to do individual work and group work, since the competition is about 50-50. The kids need to practice group work b/c they have to learn how their own dynamics work and how to allocate work. Usually they split into two pairs and each did half, then they quickly engaged the other pair to check or if they couldn't solve something. A kid who is better working by himself than in a group (often the best mathematician, interestingly) can do the group problems independently and compare his answers with the pair. It's a good way to get everyone used to the idea of checking their answers, which many kids do not do on their own.

My format during the meetings was to have them spend 5-10 minutes doing a few problems (either alone or in groups) then go over the problems on the white board. Repeat. I ended up doing a lot of teaching because many of them were deficient in how to set up the problems, or they didn't know the formulas for areas or volumes, etc. They had a huge problem going from fractions to percentages (basically, normalizing data).

You could warm them up with a fact drill. They seem to enjoy these. There are some available from the Minnesota Math Masters site for the 5th and 6th grade competitions. These are more difficult than ordinary fact drills, and even though they are from the 5th and 6th grade competitions they are perfectly suitable for 7th and 8th graders.

Some of my 6th graders had competed before, and they did great, coming in 4th out of 29 city schools with some individual honors, too.

My 5th graders were, on the other hand, not at all at the level needed to do well in the competition and came in last. For them, it was really just math triage--I didn't have enough time to teach them half of what they needed to know for the competition.

So it definitely depends in large part on what the group of kids brings to the table!

All the kids loved the competition, though. They were proud to be part of the math team and, although a little nervous, had a lot of fun.

Coaching these teams is something we can do "on the ground" to promote our vision of math. It's pretty satisfying in that respect.

October 18, 2008 at 8:04 AM
SteveH said...

Thank you very much for the feeback, Vicky. I expect I will spend a lot of time on the basics. I like your idea of warming up with a drill. It's kind of like practicing your scales in music.

"(and paying for!)"

Such an honor!


What this makes me think about are all of the kids and parents who go to other schools. I see that you are doing this for a charter school. Could you do this at your regular public school? It seems to me that public schools are losing an enormous resource when they drive kids and parents off to other schools. If they would be more open and pragmatic about education, many parents and kids would stay and do a lot more for the schools. It seems like these schools have big issues about contol.

October 19, 2008 at 5:16 AM
VickyS said...

I'm not sure if I could do MathCounts at a public school. There are plenty of public school teams but they are coached by teachers, as far as I know.

Charter schools *have* to rely on parents for a lot, so they are usually open to whatever we want to do!

Yes, our public school district is very concerned about the siphoning off of engaged parents (and students) by the charter schools and that creates a lot of tension. In some respects the district schools do have a lot of control issues, which bugs parents like me. But if you asked me the main problems that would need to be solved before I put my kid back into a district school they would be (1) math; (2) discipline and (3) ability grouping. I've told them this, but it falls on deaf ears, although I know I'm not alone. What they *think* is drawing students to charter schools is special cultural orientations, including, in their words, "mono-cultural Caucasian schools." That was a new one on me. I guess you could say my son attends one of those since there are no minorities (only 90 kids in 5 grades) but that was a drawback in my view, not a plus. To think that statistically I am considered to have selected that school for its Caucasian culture makes me mad!

October 20, 2008 at 9:57 PM
SteveH said...

"mono-cultural Caucasian schools."

Wow. That's a new one for me. There have been a few comments in our town's newspaper, but they put it differently. They rationalize that the 20%-25% of the kids who go to private schools is normal for a high SES community. These parents want an elite education. But they don't stop to think about how many poor and urban parents want an elite education, if they could afford one.

This attitude isn't universal. Our public school principal hears exactly why kids go to (and come back from, in our case) private schools. She knows that there is a big issue of academics, but they think that they are doing the best they can.

One teacher said that private schools can do more because the kids are "pre-selected". Public schools have to educate everyone. In my view, both the private school (our son went to) and our public school could do so much more. Lacking any good private school closer than an hour (each way) on a bus, we are back in public school.

I have seen some changes. The principal is much more pragmatic. Differentiated instruction and Everyday Math won't go away anytime soon, but academics and flexibility are stressed more in 7th and 8th grades. As I mentioned before, they seem to feel that adding things like the robotics league, Science Olympiad, and MathCounts will make everything OK.

In some ways, they are not willing or able to "think outside of the box", to use their words. They are stuck with very mixed-ability classes. This limits everything. They have to rationalize that this is somehow better than ability tracking. They have to select curricula like Everyday Math that allow kids to move along without mastery. They can't tell the difference between learning difficulties and teaching difficulties.

They've rationalized mixed-ability grouping for so long that they wouldn't know rigor if it punched them in the nose.

October 21, 2008 at 6:04 AM
VickyS said...

One teacher said that private schools can do more because the kids are "pre-selected". Public schools have to educate everyone.

I think that's true. But that also points out a big difference between the private schools and the charter schools. The charter schools here *have* to accept everyone; there can be no admission standards. For example, the Conservatory charter school cannot decline a student who has no interest or expertise in music, even though 4 hours of each school day is devoted to music. The "girl-focused" academy (which started up this year as an ersatz all-girls school and has 100 girls in grades 5 and 6) couldn't turn away a boy if he applied. Charter schools cannot turn away a special ed student without going through impossible hoops. So, in contrast to private schools, the charter schools here must take all comers.

Moreover, the charter schools have much fewer resources (money) than the district schools. The private schools mostly have more, many a lot more.

Because the private schools have a selected population and more money, the public schools here know they cannot compete with the private schools here and I think have long resigned themselves to that. However, it really disturbs them that the poor sister charter schools siphon off large numbers of students. When you choose a charter school, you often give up bussing, sports, music, aftercare...all sorts of things. We even just lost our admin assistant and parents are going to have to staff the front desk. Why are the public district schools losing out to these schools? Sure looks bad for the district schools, doesn't it, when families would voluntarily walk away from district resources. I wish I had the time to delve into the "data analysis" used by the district to analyze these trends, and the questionable (self-serving?) conclusions drawn from it.

October 21, 2008 at 3:00 PM

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