One perspective on the upheaval in the Huntsville school system.

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.

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!

I’ve had some notes from Huntsville parents telling me that the students there miss me.  That’s always nice to hear.  More than a half-dozen Huntsville and Cullman students made the trip all the way to Birmingham to take classes here again this year.  It will be frustrating not to work as much with some of these students this coming school year as many of them are so bright and have such good attitudes.

One of the ones who has been driven to Birmingham for classes (commuting both ways every day) is one of the students who gives me a great deal of motivation.  His curiosity leads him to start writing proofs on his own and exploring beyond what we cover in class (which is a lot, so that’s saying something).  He’s one of the reasons why the top students in Alabama will be a stronger group in coming years.

If you know anyone who is looking for a job teaching some of the brightest students in Alabama, contact Cindy Rodgers (crodgers@hsv.k12.al.us), long time math team coach and math teacher at Grissom High School in Huntsville.  I am told that there are a number of teaching positions available and that the hunt for new teachers specifically involves looking for teachers who are motivated to work with top students.

Honestly, if you love math and teach, aren’t you happiest working with the kinds of students who care about their education?  Working at one of the schools with a large math team provides exactly that kind of opportunity.

I don’t know specifics, but I believe that it’s not just the high school that is looking for teachers, but also the middle schools that feed into Grissom.

I just found out that 8 of the top 10 students at Huntsville MathCounts were MIST Academy students.  We are very proud of this exceptional group:

1st — Bill Caraway (Challenger Middle School)
2nd — Asutosh Nanda (Challenger Middle School)
3rd — Animesh Mahapatra (Challenger Middle School)
4th — Sabrina Chen (Randolph School)
6th — Ryan Murphy (Randolph School)
8th — Hedley Myers (Randolph School)
9th — Meghna Katta (Randolph School)
10th — Robert Caraway (Challenger Middle School)

Challenger (1st place) and Randolph (2nd place) advanced to the state competition.  Next year Liberty Middle School looks like a contender, though Randolph may be the team to beat.

Bill Caraway won the Countdown Round, Sabrina Chen was the high scoring 7th grader, and Robert Caraway was the high scoring sixth grader at the event.

Earlier in November, the Rocket City Junior Math Mania event took place in Huntsville for the second time.  The event began last year under the guidance of Cindy Rodgers and the Grissom High School math team and math team parents group.

While I do not have a full set of results, I have been informed of several successes by MIST Academy students:

8th Grade Individual Winners:

1st place — Animesh Mahapatra
2nd place — Asutosh Nanda
3rd place — Bill Caraway
6th place — Rahul Gaini

7th Grade Individual Winners:

2nd place — Yasanka Chalasani

6th Grade Individual Winners:

1st place — Ajay Varadhan

I will update this post if I learn of any more contest winners.

On Saturday, April 11, Cindy Rodgers and the Grissom High School math team put on the 2009 Grissom High School Math Team Tournament — an event with something like 3 decades or more of history.  In total, 560 of Alabama’s brightest young minds gathered to compete.  A complete list of award winners can be found here.

Top schools:

In the Pre-Algebra division, Pizitz claimed the top prize.  However, in the Algebra division Challenger Middle School triumphed over the state MATHCOUNTS champion Pizitz team.  Those two schools head up what seems to me like the best Alabama middle school math teams in a long time — maybe ever.  Randolph was also in the mix with a 2nd place finish in Pre-Algebra and 3rd place in Algebra, with ASFA close behind in the Algebra division.

The Vestavia Hills High School teams swept the Geometry, Algebra II, and Comprehensive divisions as they often have in the past.

In the Geometry division, Vestavia ran away from the pack.  However, there were strong performances by a number of teams and the scores were close among the next four highest scoring teams: Homewood, Cullman, Spain Park, and Hoover.  Cullman was first place among the small schools, but scored within a single problem of the talented Homewood team.

In Algebra II Vestavia’s closest competition is Hoover, led by Xinke Guo-Xue and Eugene Wu.  This is the most competitive high school division currently as at least three different Vestavia sophomores and two different Hoover sophomores have won tournaments recently.   Homewood, ASFA, and Grissom also have some strong competitors.  Albertville and Randolph also scored well at the Grissom tournament.

Vestavia’s toughest competition in recent comprehensive tournaments has been Grissom who was busy running their tournament.  Vestavia’s depth might make them the top team by a small margin, though the two teams split head-to-head matchups throughout the year with Vestavia winning at Hoover and on the State Written exam and Grissom winning at Auburn and on scoring highest on the AMC 12.

On Saturday Oak Mountain claimed 2nd prize in the comprehensive division.  This is the best finish I’ve seen from any of the Oak Mountain teams and they should be proud of the accomplishment.  Hopefully I’ll be able to recruit their best students for next year’s Alabama ARML team.  The next few teams were all very close behind: ASFA 3rd, Homewood 4th, Albertville 5th (1st among small schools), then Hoover (5th among large schools).

Here is a list of students who won awards who have enrolled in a MIST Academy class over the past year:

Pre Algebra

1st place — Sabrina Chen
2nd place — Jimmy Liu
6th place — SiLin Li
8th place — Yasanka Chalasani
12th place — Cody Duan
14th place — Pushkar Aggarwal
Algebra I

1st place — Nick Sparkman
2nd place — Botong Ma
3rd place — Asutosh Nanda
5th place — Gene Yu
7th place — Zaki Ahmed
8th place — Hema Pingali
9th place — Animesh Mahapatra
11th place — Wendy Feng

Geometry

5th place — Josh Oanca
6th place — Wesley Chow
10th place — Anshu Bansal

Algebra II

2nd place — Xinke Guo-Xue
4th place — Suyoung Jang
6th place — Andy Tang

About three months ago I attended the Vestavia Math Team Tournament as a coach of the Grissom High School math team.  I was surprised by what I saw.  The once might Grissom math team won no awards at all outside of the Comprehensive division.  The Geometry team finished 9th out of 11 teams and the Algebra 2/Trig team didn’t fare much better.

The students were disappointed, and I felt like I had done the wrong thing by concentrating entirely on Number Theory in class as opposed to the fundamentals of Geometry.  My feeling about high school math team students is that nearly all of them could use a little extra geometry — even the ones a year or two past that class.

I know the team has worked since that time, and the Hoover High School math team tournament was a chance to see where that work has taken the team.

The Geometry team won the 5th place team trophy in the large schools division.  I felt very good for those kids.

The Algebra 2/Trig team finished 3rd place, and they should now believe that they are within striking distance of competing with the very talented Homewood team that finished 2nd, though the Vestavia team is still far ahead (the Vestavia sophomores may be the most talented of Vestavia’s strong teams).

The Comprehensive team finished 2nd place despite missing two of their top three students.  This is the strongest of Grissom’s talent pools right now and when everyone is competing, they can go toe-to-toe with Vestavia, sometimes coming out on top.  This time I don’t think that two more students, however strong as they are, would have been enough to overcome the 51 point deficit to Vestavia, more than half of which came during ciphering.

On an individual level I felt good for several of the Grissom individual award winners.  Sid Nanda won a 5th place trophy — behind Vestavia’s talented Algebra 2/Trig trio and Homewood’s Elizabeth Gauntt who are all always near the top of the standings.  Sid works hard and is competing a grade level above as a freshman.  Patrick Voytek placed 8th in the Comprehensive division after some near misses on other contests.  Chase Harrison placed 9 in Comprehensive — the first top ten finish for another of Grissom’s students competing above his grade level.

All in all this was a great performance for a Grissom math team that should now feel more confident about itself.  I hope they continue to work harder and harder.  I believe that a few of them are more highly motivated lately.   As good as these performances were, I know that there are some students among the team whose scores would improve dramatically if they spent an extra hour or two each week practicing problems.

For the past few months I’ve been thinking of math team as something that doesn’t really get going for a little while in the state of Alabama, but that’s no longer the case. There have been several math team tournaments over the past few weeks and I will try to blog results and comments here as they reach me. The easiest event for me to blog is the one that I attended. The UAB tournament was the first time I have attended a math team tournament as the coach of a school team.

I enjoyed the tournament, though unfortunately only 7 of my Grissom students could make it. The rest were still productive however — running the Rocket City Junior Math Mania event. Still, those 7 students did well, scoring 3 to 5 of the problems from what I can gather. One of the Grissom students narrowly missed first place. He made a small error in computation on the hardest problem (which was worth almost 1/3 of the points on the whole test) and might have been the only student to correctly answer the second-to-last problem which was misworded in the sense that the domain of a variable was not specified. The tournament organizers rejected his appeal saying that their mistake was “a matter of mathematical convention” or somesuch, which I think is a poor way of handling a situation where the test writer was not careful enough in crafting the problem. Personally, I think asking that high school students assume that the variable m always represents an integer is neither correct, nor reasonable in the sense of understanding their level of semantic reasoning. Had that Grissom student been given credit for 7 and 8, it seems he would have placed first and his team would have placed much higher. To his credit, he didn’t seem to take it too hard.

Otherwise, the test was very good, which a variety of challenging problems, many of which were on the level of difficulty of AIME problems, which was reasonable since students were given 2 hours to solve 8 of them.

Results:

10th Grade Individual Awards

3rd place (tie) — Ellen Price (Jefferson County IB) — I may have the first name wrong, sorry

3rd place (tie) — Owen Scott (Vestavia)

1st place (tie) — Kyle Julian (Vestavia)

1st place (tie) — *Xinke Guo-Xue (Hoover)

10th Grade Team Awards

3rd — JCIB

2nd — Hoover

1st — Vestavia

11th Grade Individuals

3rd (tie) — Will Marshall (Hoover)

3rd (tie) — Luka Mernavic (Vestavia) (I’m only guessing at spelling, sorry)

2nd — Lucy Xie (Vestavia)

1st — Theo Roth (Vestavia)

11th Grade Team Awards

Honorable Mention — Grissom

3rd — Spain Park

2nd — Hoover

1st — Vestavia

*MIST Academy student

The Grissom team consisted of 3 juniors (just enough to form a team), 2 sophomore, and 2 freshmen.  I think it was a good experience for all of them and I did get the chance to discuss solutions with them after the event — they were well focused, which I appreciated.

Over the past few years, the top math team programs around Alabama have included Vestavia, Hoover, ASFA, recently Homewood, and the Grissom team I now help Cindy Rodgers with.  I have noticed more and more results from the JCIB school.  I talked briefly with their math team coach and I hope that some of the students there begin to get involved in Alabama ARML.  The team will be stronger if they do!  Spain Park is a relatively new high school in Hoover that is also starting to place students and teams at Alabama math team events.  I hope to see participation from their students as well.