This past weekend Sergey Sarkisov, several parents, and I traveled with the Alabama ARML teams (plural because once again Alabama has two full teams) to the Georgia site to compete in the American Regions Mathematics League.  A great time was had by all not only during the competition itself, but in numerous card games and ultimate frisbee contests (I came back a little sore).

I am very happy to report that the Alabama team’s score rose more than that of any other team in the nation.  Last year Alabama surely had the youngest team with 6 middle schoolers and only 9 high school students including just 2 seniors.  That team outscored 40% of the 120 other competing teams at the 2010 ARML contest.  This year the team was a bit older and more experienced, though still perhaps the youngest competing top team with 4 middle school students and only 3 seniors.  Alabama scored 77 points more than last year and outscored 65% of the 132 other competing teams.  An excellent showing for a still very young team.

The good: The team improved a great deal during the Power Round.  While scores on this round were higher nation-wide, perhaps no other team improved by 19 points in this 50 point round.  The relay scores were also good with Alabama finishing 10th in the nation — the highest finish during any round.  Also, the Alabama B team scored 21/50 during the Power Round which is great for a team of mostly middle school students.  Senior Owen Scott and junior Jerry Hsu found themselves in the Tie Breaker after scoring 8/10 during the Individual Round.  From what I gather this is the equivalent of scoring in the 95th to 99th percentile overall among individuals — very impressive considering the level of competition.

The bad: The team solved 5/10 during the Team Round for a total of 25/50 points.  This team was certainly capable of a better performance during the Team Round, so there is substantial room for improvement.

The fortunate: Organizing and grading the Power Round was much easier this year due to the nature of the problem.  Instead of feeling exhausted after the process I was able to enjoy watching the end of the competition — particularly the Super Relay where Alabama nearly pulled off first prize (had the answer, not simplified *sigh*) and won second prize (a large pile of candy that got passed around the bus).

Only 3 of the 30 Alabama students were seniors and it is likely that we’ll have several more of the state’s math superstars compete with us who couldn’t make it this year.

Thanks to Sergey Sarkisov and the several parents who volunteered their time to help with the team and support Alabama ARML.

One perspective on the upheaval in the Huntsville school system.

Tomorrow morning the Alabama MATHCOUNTS team competes against 55 other teams at the MATHCOUNTS National Championship.  The final round airs live streaming from the MATHCOUNTS website at 2:30 PM ET/1:30 PM CT.  I will post the team’s results here when I find out how they did.

This is a great group of students, so tune in and root them on!

The last 24 hours have been brutal around Alabama.  Many people I know have had their homes damaged — mostly by trees.  Dozens are confirmed dead around the state — the result of scores of tornadoes.

We live about five miles south of the downtown Birmingham area that got demolished by a large tornado.  Fortunately all the tornadoes passed just to the north or south of us, but there were a lot of them and there is debris everywhere.  Even before this evening’s round of tornadoes power lines were down from this morning’s storms — some just lying in the road.  Though what happened this evening was far worse.

There are stories about mail from Tuscaloosa landing 50-60 miles away in the Birmingham area and witnesses talk about bricks flying around by the thousands.  Softball sized hail rained on some homes.  Entire neighborhoods were flattened and businesses destroyed.  Swaths of trees snapped, fell, or were uprooted for miles.  Families are posting on Facebook to let each other know that they’re okay, but clearly not everyone was so lucky.

This is the kind of tragedy so large that people are coming together everywhere to help each other clean up, heal up, and move forward.

Be well.  Be safe.

I recently had an email exchange with a friend of mine — a young doctor who graduated nearly three years ago from Harvard Medical School and has embarked on a career helping sick children:

…I’m actually about to finish residency in 2.5 months (and who’s counting?) I’m the senior on the general pediatrics service right now and while it’s super busy, and I’m exhausted, it’s fantastic. My interns are bright and hardworking and I find that I’ve actually learned a ton in the past three years, so I have a lot to teach. (It’s more surprising than it sounds.) They seem to think I’m a good senior and a good doctor, so that’s incredibly flattering.

I’m not sure if you heard but I matched at Seattle for pediatric intensive care fellowship. I had an attraction for taking care of the sickest kids–I like the relationships you develop with families in the ICU, I like the hands-on feel, and I love the medicine there. I have friends in residency who come across sick kids on other rotations and have told me, “I thought to myself–what would Leslie do?” Also very flattering. Maybe it’s something about that math/physics background makes the physics of medicine–how the heart works, how the lungs work, how it goes wrong when kids are super sick–then makes the most sense to me. Anyway, I’ve signed up for three more years of training, but I have a full medical license now in Washington and I’m a fully-trained pediatrician, so that’s hugely satisfying. It feels like it took forever–I can’t believe I’m almost 30–but I love having a job where I have no crises of conscience.

Emphasis mine.  She previously told me how she taught some of the other med students at Harvard how to setup and solve equations that correct for medicinal dosage.  I suspect most of those Harvard med students had previously learned how to do all that, but being one of the top math team students in Alabama likely helped Leslie understand algebraic problem solving to a level where she not only retained those skills but could verbalize them to the benefit of others around her.

Results are in from all rounds now.  During the testing portions of the competition, Vestavia won the Comprehensive and Geometry examinations while the Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA) won the Algebra II/Trigonometry portion.  This past weekend at the State Ciphering event, Hoover High School edged out Vestavia to win its second consecutive state championship — a first in school history for Hoover which has a particularly talented group right now.

The “Final Four” from state ciphering:
Hoover 202 points
Vestavia 190 points
Grissom 174 points
ASFA 146 points

Over the past few weeks I’ve been organizing the Alabama ARML team.  Last year marked an exciting if rocky restart to the Alabama ARML program.  Most of the 20 competing students were 8th or 9th graders, and the team finished below around 2/3 of the competing teams.  Most of the students were new to the competition and dipped their toes in the water to see how it feels.  The excitement on the bus on the way home indicated that most of the students enjoyed the experience.

This year we have 33 commitments and possibly two or three more on the way.  It appears we’ll be able to field two full teams, and this group will be much improved, though the number of middle schoolers competing may be a dozen or more.  Team A will be greatly improved.  The goal I plan to encourage them to take on is to move ahead of at least half the teams that outscored them last year.  Around 1/3 of the team is made up of USAMO and USAJMO qualifiers while another 1/3 of the team was within a couple of AIME problems from achieving that status. I don’t think the team really knows where it stands, and it’s still a very young group, but I think this year’s ARML contest will help open their eyes to the results of their hard work.

Everybody knows that the number of homeschoolers has increased dramatically over the past decade.  The reasons for more homeschooling have been split between primarily academic and primarily religious, though I’d throw in “primarily philosophical” as a category that seems to be expanding, though this probably gets lumped into “primarily academic”.

Homeschooling is a substantial commitment and means giving up around $12,000 per student per year in taxpayer funded support of the public school systems.  So I expected a few homeschooled students to join MIST Academy when I moved here.  A few have, but surprisingly the larger number of homeschoolers joining MIST seem to be from the Huntsville/Madison area which makes me ponder whether more families there are rejecting the public schools for academic reasons.  Having spent two years teaching there, I can understand.  Nobody seems satisfied.

This makes me wonder: will there be some city in which the academic homeschool community grows so large that they simply become a sort of mega-school community?  I bet so!  It will be interesting to see where this happens first.  It will also be interesting to see how the tax politics change when that happens.

The lists of USAJMO and USAMO qualifiers have been posted.

First, congratulations to Kyle Julian, Stephen Atwood, Botong Ma, and Animesh Mahapatra for qualifying!  Making it to the USA Math Olympiads is always a special honor.

Unfortunately I have no been able to determine the qualification index yet.  But the USAMO index must be at least 215 because a student here in Alabama scored 214.5 and didn’t qualify.

Preliminary results from the Alabama State Written Examination have been emailed out.  Congratulations to these highest scoring teams in Alabama, listed strictly in scoring order regardless of division:

Comprehensive Division

1st place — Vestavia Hills High School (938 points)
2nd place — Hoover High School (855 points)
3rd place — Oak Mountain High School (767 points)
4th place — Albertville High School (755 points)
5th place — Cullman High School (734 points)

Algebra II/Trig Divsion

1st place –  Alabama School of Fine Arts (888 points)
2nd place — Grissom High School (760 points)
3rd place — Vestavia Hills High School (718 points)
4th place — Hoover High School (613 points)
5th place — Spain Park High School (606 points)

Geometry Division

1st place — Vestavia Hills High School (731 points)
2nd place — Spain Park High School (685 points)
3rd place — Hoover High School (655 points)
4th place — Homewood High School (602 points)
5th place — Grissom High School (571 points)

Later I will post some of the high scoring individuals.