Each year I judge what I’m doing here at MIST Academy partially by the AMC statistics.  The 2011 statistics for the AMC 10 and 12 A & B exams have been released.  I pay more attention to the AMC 10 than the AMC 12 because only a few of my students are yet old enough to be taking the AMC 12, though I suspect I would find mildly favorable results.  Instead I focus my analysis on the AMC 10 exams that scores of my students take each year.

2010:
1.72% of total test takers qualified for the AIME.
0.93% of Alabama test takers qualified for the AIME.
The Alabama/Total qualification rate ratio was about .538.

2011:
4.94% of total test takers qualified for the AIME.
3.29% of test takers in Alabama qualified for the AIME.
The Alabama/Total qualification rate ratio was about .666.

Note that these statistics include test takers in other countries that often include a selection bias.

The increase in the relative rate is 23.8%, which is substantial for a single year.  I believe that next year will show an additional jump that may be just as large due to a very strong 9th grade class and an exceptionally deep 8th grade class.

Of the 21 qualifying scores on the AMC 10 exams in Alabama, at least 13 were by MIST Academy students and some others used materials written by MIST Academy instructors to study, though I don’t yet know some of those results — the 13 number is a lower bound.

I was happy to find out today that four students I had the good fortune to work with from 2008 to 2010 when I taught in Huntsville were the highest scoring team in their division (Rock Division) on National Assessment & Testing’s Four-by-Four competition.  Cool stuff!

The AMC 8 is the middle school competition run by the American Mathematics Competitions, the gold standard for math competitions in the United States.

In 2009, Alabama boasted 9 scorers in the Distinguished Honor Roll (top 1% nationally).  In 2010 that number jumped to 14 (with one of the two returning Distinguished Honor Roll students choosing not to sit for the exam).  At least 9 of those 14 students are MIST Academy students, including perfect scorer Charles Li (Louis Pizitz Middle School).  However, we have not yet heard the scores of all our students.

Louis Pizitz Middle School had the highest team score in the state at 73 (out of 75 possible) points.  While I don’t know for certain, I have a sneaking suspicion that second highest team score, 72, belonged to Baldwin Magnet in Montgomery.  Bumpus Middle School in Hoover scored 67 points, which was third highest in the state.

Well done Alabama!

MIST Academy boasts the highest scoring 5th grade student in the state (William Zhang), the highest scoring 6th grade student in the state (Yunchao Zhang), the highest scoring 7th grader (Brandon Smith), and one of the two perfect papers (who are both 8th graders).  We are very proud of the spectacularly imaginative and creative efforts of these and all our students.

We will post a more complete list of scores as they become available.

This is the third year in which Alabama ARML has participated in the ARML Power Contest, a challenging national math competition in which solutions to problems must be justified and often proved rigorously.  During the first two years of the competition, the team did not perform well.  The students in Alabama were simply not ready for a national level solution-writing event.  After scoring around 11 out of 40 points on the first round each of the past two years, many of the participants were either disinterested or discouraged to show up for the second round.

It was hard to know how to encourage the students.  Some of them would ask me for advice, but the older students often did not know how to take the advice I would give: stop working on math as a drill-based quick-formula-recall event; work problems that take 10 or 20 minutes to think through, and work until you understand results fully; think through theorems and formulas you know until you understand why they work, can prove them, and can even apply the motivations behind them to other problems; play around with ideas outside of even the math team curriculum; find better books to read; keep coming to Alabama ARML events and see what the most successful students are doing.

So, the burden of competing has fallen mostly to younger students, possibly because they are young enough to be forming good habits of learning and understanding from the start.  Just as 8th and 9th graders made up most of the 2010 Alabama ARML team, 8th and 9th graders were again the majority of the (only) ten students who showed up to compete in the first round of the ARML Power Contest.  And one 6th grader.

Fortunately the team was led by experience senior Xinke Guo-Xue, who solved most of the later problems all the while communicating advice to the younger students who were new or relatively new to solution-writing events.  Freshman Leigh Marie Braswell was also very busy, writing up several solutions (which all received full points), and exclaiming, “I love this problem!”

Instead of ranking as one of the lowest scoring teams this year, Alabama ARML is on the first page of results with 33 out of 40 points.  The result would certainly have been better with a larger team — problem 6 was relatively easy, but misunderstood by the solver (a very talented 8th grader) who could have used more advice, discussion, and oversight from a larger number of experienced students.  It is easy to imagine that as these young students mature and continue to learn, they will have the opportunity to earn every point on such a test — a feat that no team in the nation achieved this time.

Congratulations Alabama ARML!  In one year you moved from around the bottom 15% of teams to around the top 30% of a highly select group.  The enjoyment that you show for learning deeper mathematics shows up in results like these.  This is a great beginning for a very young and very talented group and I continue to be impressed with your dedication.  I can’t wait to see what you do next.

A few weeks ago a bunch of my students told me that both Vestavia and ASFA would be traveling to Tallahassee, Florida to compete at an invitational math tournament at Rickards High School.  I thought that this would be a great chance for the students to see how well they were doing early on — there are few math tournaments in Alabama early on in the year — particularly at the high school level (Vestavia’s is in December, which is already late in the first semester). I’m guessing that around 35 MIST Academy students made the trip to Florida.

One of the teachers who used to work with students at Rickards just emailed me and told me that these teams did well in several divisions.  If I get a complete list of results, or a link, I will post a more complete set of results, or link to them.  But I wanted to share the good news.

In Algebra II/Trig, the Alabama School of Fine Arts finished first place among all schools with 557 points and the top three students overall.  The Vestavia team was second place with 424 points — still well above defending Mu Alpha Theta national champs Bucholz, which scored 302 points at the competition.  These are very impressive results!

In Algebra I, Pizitz Middle School had 13 of the top 15 students and outscored to the next two teams combined.  Wow!

In PreAlgebra, Pizitz had 13 of the top 15 again and won first place.

I hope this information is all correct.  Congratulations to those teams for their strong performance!  I think they just helped put Alabama back on the math team map.  Given how strong the middle school students in Alabama are this year, I wish that some of the other great programs could have traveled to the event as well.  I think that Bumpus, Discovery, Liberty, Simmons, Berry, and others might have swept the top 5 teams in Algebra I.  And while the best students at Randolph compete in grade levels above, they certainly have one of the top middle school math teams in Alabama this year.

I was asked if I could pass along any materials to at least one of the Florida math team coaches after Pizitz “humbled” the competition, and I may eventually have polished enough materials that I would like to share them.  But the success of MIST Academy is only tangentially about the materials.  It is about a lot of things including the spirit of the classroom, being a center of community and culture, the way the classes are run, the balance between exploring new ideas and practicing problem solving, practical psychology, and so many others that it would take pages and pages to write about.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I planned a free two hour Graph Theory class and emailed invited out through the Alabama ARML and MIST Academy mailing lists.  But fifteen students showed up tonight.  Perhaps the best part about the turnout was that 12 of the 15 students were 8th and 9th graders.  And they did amazingly well with problems involving connected graphs, paths, bipartite graphs, and planar graphs.  Toward the end we established Euler’s Theorem/Formula for planar graphs (and ordinary convex polyhedra) and even proved that there can be only the five Platonic solids.

The handout I wrote is 25 pages long, so we did not have time to cover nearly all of it, but the stronger problems solvers have plenty more to chew on, and it’s good that all those younger students were exposed.

After the first year and half of living in Alabama, I was a little down about the low level of interest in mathematics outside of the local contests, but the students have gradually responded.  But it had to come from the younger students, growing up thinking that a deeper level of mathematics was more interesting.  They’ve had the opportunity to be exposed to stuff that makes them go “Wow!” and they seem to want more of it.  I am more and more impressed by their drive, and I’m working hard to keep up with it.  I thought that I’d never again write as many pages of math as I did during the first year I ran MIST Academy, but I was wrong.  I’ve written 400 pages to keep up with their thirst for more — just in the past three months.  It will be nice to take a week break from writing after Fall classes are over.  It will be nicer when my whole curriculum is nice place and I’m just writing the extra, cool stuff.

One of the principles on which I founded MIST Academy was that people respond positively if you treat them as if they can be great.  Particularly brilliant young minds who believe that they can be great, and are often a bit (or quite) irritated that nobody gives them credit, or expects more of them.  This doesn’t mean handing everything to children easily.  It means keeping a basic level of good discipline, then being able to talk with them as humans (not mere children), then helping them see what comes to them when they take responsibility for themselves and work hard.  From there, the rest is pure fun.  My job consists of writing about fascinating topics and then seeing energetic young minds become enthralled with it.  How cool is that?  I’m not saying it’s easy, but it’s certainly worth the effort.

Yesterday I held the first MATHCOUNTS and ARML practices of the year here at MIST Academy.

In the morning, 11 students showed up to practice at the chapter and state levels of MATHCOUNTS.  The turnout wasn’t as high as last year’s practices because I did not advertise the practices as directly to the students or send out an email reminder.  I was honestly afraid that I would have more than I could handle.  Last year’s first practice included 24 students, which required us to open a second classroom at the school.  We started earlier this year, with the most dedicated students.  They really impressed me.  There were a lot of scores in the 30′s on state level tests, and some in the high 20′s as well.  It’s amazing to think that two and a half years ago only one student in the state broke a score of 30.  We may soon have more than a dozen who can do that consistently just here at MIST Academy — and I know there are several of the brightest middle school students in the state that we don’t work with who can also do that.

The afternoon ARML session was also relatively small, though from what I heard from the students, there will be more students attending in the future.  The 11 students who did show up included four of the middle school students who came to  MATHCOUNTS practice — giving up six hours on a Saturday to work hard math problems.

The ARML scores were relatively good.  There was one 5, and several 2′s, 3′s, and 4′s (out of 8 tough problems).  Not bad considering that only one senior and two juniors showed up.  My hope is that the number of participating students grows to around 20 for each practice, and that we have at least 30 who want to make the trip this year.  I think we’ll exceed that number.

The students worked two team tests shorthanded, getting 6 problems on the first and 4 on the second (more recent) test.  Not bad considering that less than half of the students participating are likely to be on Team A.  A sixth grader in attendance correctly answered problem 8 (the last problem) during the Individual problems practice.  Wow!

No students outside of MIST Academy showed up, which disappoints me a little.  I’ve tried to build bridges to students outside of the program, but it’s a slow process.  Last year seven of the twenty students who traveled with us had not taken any MIST Academy classes, and my hope is that we’ll draw more of those students again over time.  One of the ASFA teachers is pushing ARML on his students, so maybe we’ll get a few more talented freshmen on the team.

I’m still predicting a 40 point increase in the team’s score this year.  The team was so young last year.  If the current students continue to improve the way they have been, it wouldn’t surprise me to see back-to-back 40 point improvements.

I sometimes feel like I should spend more time preparing the ARML team, though I do feel that the time I spend building my classes is generally more valuable to more students, and may do more to help the MATHCOUNTS and ARML teams in the long run.  I don’t just focus on contest math with the curriculum.  I try to achieve a balance of problem solving, understanding, and proof writing.

I’ll try to schedule more of these practices throughout the year, but it’s tough to have one day off out of twenty.

This is the third year I’ve started teaching at the start of the school year, and each year I see a tremendous amount of progress in building up the math culture here in Alabama.  I’m amazed by these kids.  For the third year I’ve thought that the 8th grade students were a stronger group overall.  In fact, I’m almost stunned by this year’s 8th graders statewide.  There is so much talent and it’s better developed.  Three years ago there were just two or three 8th graders working at a very high level.  Now it may be 15-20.  Now I’m looking down at the 6th grade group and wondering if it might be the best group I’ve had in class to this point.

Predictions for this school year:

Alabama will have an even greater share of the top scores on the AMC 8. Potentially much greater.

Alabama will again climb in the results at National MathCounts (43rd in 2008, 33rd in 2009, 19th in 2010).  This group has the potential for a very high finish — they have the chance to outscore some of the big states.

Alabama will have more AIME qualifiers — particularly through the AMC 10, which is the harder route for qualification.  It won’t surprise me if that last number doubles.

Alabama will have more olympiad qualifiers — for both olympiads.  Perhaps we’ll see the first award winner from Alabama in over a decade.

Alabama ARML will pass several dozen teams.  There are at least three seniors I’d like to add to the team, and if they all join, there is the potential for a top 20 finish.  Two or three years from now, that could be a normal event.

I think these improvements go hand-in-hand with kids enjoying what they’re doing.  I have more and more students in class who seem absolutely thrilled to be working on higher level material.  Yesterday one of my sophomores told me that her 6th grade brother was depressed after his two week MIST Academy summer program ended.  Any kids who enjoys working that much on challenging material is going to move forward more quickly with his education.  This is the primary reason why the middle and high school math communities are growing so strong this quickly.

What these kids are doing is very special.  I hope they gain some positive attention from the broader education community.  They are investing a lot of time now, but that time will make their math, science, and technology classes easier to handle down the road.

These kids are a lot of fun to be around.  I have a good job.  Long hours, but very good.

Out of 35 states and the District of Columbia, Alabama ranked 36th in the recent scoring for Obama’s Race to the Top (RTT) initiative.

Alabama finished dead last in the latest round for Race to the Top federal education grants — a showing Superintendent Joe Morton blamed partly on a lack of charter school legislation and a lack of help from the teachers’ union. 

Why?

The scoring criteria is here.

There is no leadership. And what leadership there might be is constantly thwarted by AEA head Paul Hubbert.

Then again, just about nobody in Alabama, perhaps besides failed gubernatorial candidate Bradley Byrne (who switched from the Democratic party to the Republican party when he realized that no progress could be made in education from within the Democratic party so long as Hubbert pulled the strings) steps up to provide any leadership.  Of course, Hubbert funded many of the scary ads against Byrne during the campaign.

While I don’t agree with some of the RTT criteria or their weightings, and I think that most of it can be politically manipulated (Massachusetts is notorious for changing its testing methodologies often enough that no assessment can be made to track student progress or teacher performance, but this wins points in RTT), and I see taxing citizens and then giving the money back one state at a time is abuse of the federalist system, I think that parts of the criteria are fair standards for judgment.  Some of them are as common sense as “using data to improve instruction,” and “providing high quality pathways for aspiring teachers and principals.”

In the meantime, there is no leadership to accomplish these goals.  In Alabama the teachers are beholden to the politics of Paul Hubbert.  To speak against his agenda is heresy.  And to work together with educators outside of his system means working with heretics.  So every pathway into the profession of public education involves kissing his ring right up until tenure is awarded.  And once teachers are tenured, their incentive to change the system or rock the boat diminishes.  The system means an extremely comfortable pension, and time each summer to make money tutoring students who might be farther ahead if the system weren’t in such bad shape.

Of course, all my generalizations are just that — generalizations.  There are some great teachers, but what support do they get?  The teachers hired to coach sports teams make more money, and there is precious little resource left after the demands of the teachers unions are met.  Case in point: this year Alabama sent textbook reviewers home, telling them that they might as well not do the job since there is no money for textbooks.

Textbooks?  I’ve written 3000 or so pages of math curriculum since I founded MIST Academy almost three years ago.  If the state would hear me out, I would provide cheaper and high quality textbooks myself.  But the member of the state Board of Education I met with told me that unless I came with money in my hands, it was highly unlikely that anyone would listen.

Perhaps Alabama can’t raise the money to bribe bureaucrats into better policy…

No wonder Massachusetts leads the field.

Another of the criteria for RTT is building innovative schools.  I would call MIST Academy just that, though I bet almost nobody involved in education at the state level even knows we exist, and fewer care to find out what we’re doing and why it’s working.

Per schooling hour, MIST Academy runs on almost exactly the same level of budget as an Alabama public school.  Our focus is on excellent math students, but to make a comparison, consider the successes Alabama has had already.  From 2008 to 2010 Alabama moved from 43rd at National MathCounts to 19th, and I feel certain that this improvement will continue and last.  From 2008 to 2010 Alabama went from 0 students making the cutoff for the national math olympiad (1 was invited) to 5 students making the cutoff.

If we can do that here with around 100 students in class (only around 30 of which are in high school and 20 of which are in elementary school), imagine what could be done on a larger scale if educational leadership comes from people who care instead of people who are beholden to the political system.

Somebody has to rock the boat.  There are a hundreds conversations that need to enter the common local public dialogue, and proponents of higher quality education should organize outside of the system, discuss priorities and ideas, and make change happen.

Over the past 21 months I’ve spent over 90 days in Huntsville.  Partial days at least, but working days nonetheless.  That’s a lot of time and energy and I’m happy I did it.  The kids I’ve worked with have been amazing and while they have earned a great many awards, the real benefits to them are yet to come.  I never asked them to study hardcore for math contests, but some of them worked very hard as they set goals for themselves.  But we did learn a lot of math, and we discussed math in a way that engenders understanding.  Many of these kids will be able to move forward smoothly with their education.  Some of them can write good proofs already and for others, that skill is just around the corner if they keep at it.

One thing I try to impart on students is that they are responsible for their own education.  I will be interested to see how independent they become in their motivations and discipline.

After my first class in Huntsville yesterday I told the kids that I would not be returning to Huntsville to teach next year, but that we are working to establish another very talented teacher to continue Huntsville classes.  The kids declared that they could build me a house and I could stay.  After class, most of the kids turned around before getting in their parents cars and lined up to shake my hand.  That they did so independently makes me feel very good about the time I’ve spent there.