About a week and a half ago I had a new student in class.  She was just taking a look to see if she liked it.  After the class was over her parents signed her up for two MIST Academy summer classes at which point she exclaimed, “There go summer plans!”

This past Thursday, at the end of class, this same student said, “Tomorrow is the last day of class?  Awwwwww!”  I guess now she likes math class better than her summer plans.

Reason Magazine has a very interesting interview with Peter Thiel:

reason: You were a Stanford undergrad and law student. After you graduated, your career seemed to be taking a policy wonk direction.

Thiel: As an undergraduate at Stanford, I started The Stanford Review, which ended up being very engaged in the hot debates of the time: campus speech codes, questions about diversity on campus, all sorts of debates like that. I ended up writing a book on it, The Diversity Myth, the thesis of which was basically that there was no real diversity when you had a group of people who looked different but thought alike, and what really was needed was a diversity of ideas.

In parallel I was obviously on the law track. I worked at a law firm in New York very briefly. I’d always been good at math—I was a nationally ranked chess player as an undergraduate—and I shifted over into trading financial derivatives at Credit Suisse Financial Products in ’94.

reason: How did you make that transition?

Thiel: They gave me a math test, and I got all the questions right.

Hat tip to Rob Sperry.

The 2008 Fall class schedule has been posted, including classes for Huntsville students.

I look forward to working with both Birmingham and Huntsville students now.  While I can’t wait to work with all these students to help build the state MATHCOUNTS and ARML teams, where all these bright students can work together, I also can’t wait to see what kinds of rivalries get stoked.  Many students best thrive in a competitive environment, and I think the Alabama math team community is about to become more competitive very quickly.

Teaching elementary school children is still new to me. Today I had two rising fourth grade girls discover the recursive constructions for hexagonal and heptagonal numbers. Perhaps I “prompted” them by building successive pentagonal numbers out of magnetix, but the truth is that I wasn’t paying attention when each of them made their discoveries.

At the end of class, each of them gave me a hug before leaving. That too is new for me.

for Mathematics teachers:

1. Know your subject.

2. Be interested in your subject.

3. Know about the ways of learning: the best way to learn anything is to discover it by yourself.

4. Try to read the faces of your students, try to see their expectations and difficulties, put yourself in their place.

5. Give them not only information, but “know-how,” attitudes of mind, the habit of methodical work.

6. Let them learn guessing.

7. Let them learn proving.

8. Look out for such features of the problem at hand as may be useful in solving the problems to come — try to disclose the general pattern that lies behind the present concrete situation.

9. Do not give away your whole secret at once — let the students guess before you tell it — let them find out for themselves as much as is feasible.

10. Suggest it; do not force it down their throats.

Past, present, and future MIST Academy students and their families are invited to the first annual MIST Academy potluck picnic at the Birmingham Zoo. The event will begin at 11 AM on Saturday, July 19 and will be held at the picnic area to the left of the Birmingham Zoo parking lot as cars enter (I plan to be there early to reserve the covered pavilion so that we can all enjoy the shade). Please RSVP by emailing me so that my wife and I can prepare the event as best as possible. Bring a friend if you like. Those who want to stay can join us afterward for a walk through the zoo. MIST Academy will bring one cooler with ice and sodas, and our own potluck dishes. Other drinks can be added to the cooler. Please let us know if you can help out in any way.

Huntsville families who wish to join us are also welcome.

It’s amazing to realize that less than 200 years ago there were educated people who believed completely absurd things about the nature of basic arithmetic:

It is well to direct the pupil’s attention here at once to a great far-reaching law of nature and of thought. It is this, that between two relatively different things or ideas there stands always a third, in a sort of balance, seeming to unite the two. Thus, there is here between odd and even numbers one number (one) which is neither of the two. Similarly, in form, the right angle stands between the acute and obtuse angles; and in language, the semi-vowels or aspirants between the mutes and vowels. A thoughtful teacher and a pupil taught to think for himself can scarcely help noticing this and other important laws.

– Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel

There is a popular website and blog I read from time to time called Stuff White People Like. Some people find it offensive, but I find it amusing (I see it as ridiculing certain cultural values, not dehumanizing my race). A lot of the topics it covers relate to what I sometimes call the “religion of cool”, where people stop making decisions based on utility and happiness, and instead based on what will make them most popular. I’m sure this happens in all cultures, but I know it happens in predominantly white American culture. After all, white people need to show that we’re not just boring rulers of the modern world feeling superior to other races. In fact, I think a large part of the reason why fewer white students currently achieve at high levels of math and science compared with their first or second generation Asian American counterparts is the social pressure built up regarding the religion of cool. Of course, it’s also true that a child born into American levels of wealth doesn’t usually have quite the same set of incentives as hard working immigrants — and this certainly has a substantial effect on achievement.

Today’s SWPL article hits the nail on the head:

White people hate math. If you want to befriend white people, mention “that weird Asian calculus teacher who drew perfect circles” and how much you hated his class (bonus points if you mention how your parents made you get an even worse tutor who was more clueless than you and smelled bad). However, white
people are fascinated by “the power of statistics” since the math has already been done for them. Some magazines, like TIME, have a section in each magazine that has some interesting statistics ($80 trillion: the amount spent by the US in the Iraqi war) followed by absurd, barely related ones (4,317 yards: the
distance covered if you were to take all the ammunition shells fired by US soldiers in Iraq since the war started). White people who read TIME will quote these statistics, but even non-TIME reading white people will throw in stats they read in a less-than-credible study. It’s not unusual to hear such things
as “I don’t mind this neighborhood since I’m not Republican. 80% of them are anti-minority, you know” or “I don’t think you should let Sally play softball because 70% of softball players are lesbians”.

The other day when I met with Buzz Vance (recent Birmingham and Alabama MATHCOUNTS coordinator), he gave me a lot of past MATHCOUNTS files — mostly to help guide me in taking over as chapter and state coordinator. One of the files he gave me shows the results from the 2005 Alabama MATHCOUNTS competition. Not surprisingly, the top two students on that list were on the 2008 Alabama ARML team. However, the next three students (and yet another in the top 10) were from Randolph.

Randolph could have sent several students along with Alabama ARML this year (they were invited), but their Science Olympiad team went to nationals, soaking up most or all of their ARML team members. Hopefully that conflict does not repeat itself in 2009. As seniors, those students would certainly add a lot to the team — both in terms of talent and leadership.

Hopefully I can also recruit some students from Mountain Brook and the Baldwin Magnet program, and possibly Covenant — but I don’t know enough about Covenant to know if that school continues into high school. Some private schools stop or start at the middle school level.

Yesterday I taught for four hours at the Hoover High School’s summer math team camp for rising freshmen and sophomores. I covered some combinatorics, probability, and number theory. The lessons went mostly well, but four hours of class with only an hour of lunch in between is too much for all but the most avid math team students. All the kids were great, but I could see a couple of them getting tired toward the end. If I do that again, I’ll come up with some kind of an hour long experiment to display an interesting point, and not even try to cover so many topics. Lesson learned.

After class we all went to the planetarium in the Sciencenter and watched Flatland the movie. It was my first time seeing the film and I enjoyed it. Afterward, Professor Jeffrey Powell walked the students through a cool and approachable combinatorics problem that delved into higher dimensions. His talk made me glad I had spend so much time on combinations in the morning with the kids.