We just added a 2012 AMC 10 B Solution Guide to the growing list of AMC contest resources at Gliya.

Results from the 2011 AMC 8 are now public, and we are very pleased to see so many current and recent MIST Academy students among the award winners.  These awards represent strong efforts by an awesome group of students, though you might not realize how hard they work if you saw them having fun in class!

MIST Academy Award Winners on the AMC 8 by years:

2008: 8
2009: 17
2010: 16
2011: 30

I suspect this recent jump represents a jump in the number of students who have been with us since an early age, exploring a wider variety of mathematical topics to a deeper level.

I spent all of yesterday writing up a 2012 AMC 10 A Solution Guide, and I’ll hopefully complete a 2012 AMC 12 A Solution Guide this evening, though I have class and potentially a basketball game to attend tonight.  If time permits, I plan to make this a regular writing effort.  Most of the solutions can be sorted into our other lesson documents.

I’m debating whether or not to do the same with each new MATHCOUNTS, AIME, and AMC 8 exam.  These exams have solution guides, but they usually aren’t written in a way that captures the mind of the broadest audience, and that’s my goal.

I just finished uploading the first batch of Gliya curriculum to a forum post.  We’ll eventually make nice webpages to guide students through the curriculum, but for now this is over 100 pages of free curriculum that students worldwide can use to learn from.

In particular, much of this curriculum should be helpful to students studying for the AMC 8 exam and MATHCOUNTS.  It does not include the harder concepts and problems tested at state or national MATHCOUNTS, but it should be accessible to a wide swath of students — both contest problem solvers and otherwise.

This curriculum is currently in what I would call “semi-polished” form.  That’s fine with us because it’s best to be practical and help students learn now than to be perfectionist and wait months or years until its in its highest quality form.

We’ll gradually release thousands of pages of curriculum at many levels over the next year or two, and continue to polish our work, adding additional features to the site along the way.

A year ago I wrote two of the topic tests for this year’s Mu Alpha Theta National Convention.  Students are given one hour to work on 30 problems during these tests.  I spent time considering how I might write such tests, and I came up with the following philosophy:

*There should be problems for every interested student at the competition to work on.
*There should be problems that challenge every student to think in new ways with tools they already understand.
*Students should be interested enough in the problems themselves to want to read the solution manual (at least parts) and they should learn from reading it.
*It should be unlikely that more than a scarce few students finish more than 25 problems.
*The easier problems should take the best students very little time so that the top students can quickly move through at least half of the test.

I felt the last principle to be highly important because one hour is not a lot of time and 30 is a large number of problems.  I wanted the most motivated students to have a different competition experience where they tried to solve 6 or 8 or 10 of the 15 harder problems and there was plenty of diversity among the challenges to make places between the students highly meaningful.  I also wanted students with singular expertise to be able to earn their teams more points as opposed to writing a test with a low ceiling for perfection where many schools might earn maximum points and places are determined more by errors than solutions.  To me this is a positive definition of specialization and that seems to be what the topics tests are all about.

Here are the tests that I wrote:
* Alpha Sequences and Series (key and solution guide)
* Open Combinatorics (key and solution guide)

It’s not clear to me if they were ever edited between the time I wrote them and the time the competition was held because I never received feedback.  So it may be that the competition tests looked different.

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.

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!

Strictly Ballroom is one of my favorite movies.  It’s the tale of a dancing family whose son breaks away from the establishment and dances “his own steps”.  In the meantime he falls in love with the artificially awkward and socially abused girl who began the film as a blur in the background of the dance school.  It’s a serious social critique moved along by a sometimes wacky series of sad and comedic events.

One of the themes Strictly Ballroom explores is how established institutions quickly fall prey to the desires of their clergy to maintain their status.  This point is personified by the dance federation director, Barry Fife: “If you can’t dance a step, you can’t teach it, and if you can’t teach it — we might as well all pack up and go home. With young Liz available again, you’ve got a chance to get your status quo vadis back… so to speak.”

Somewhere in all this is one of the most important lessons in education, but I’ll leave that part to the reader.

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