![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Kids and math: three things
1. Hmm. So remember how I told you E did reasonably on the JMO? I'm not taking that back, but it turns out to be somewhat more complicated than that.
The exam is two days, and she got out having solved one problem Day 1 and two problems on Day 2. (This will be relevant later.) Each problem is 7 points, so that's a total of 21 points. She looked at the solutions and they lined up with what she had done. And when awards came out, she had got the lowest-tier award, which I think is approximately 14-21 points, so that was all as we had expected. That's when I made the last post.
However... I must admit here that she and I had not yet seen her actual results, because she gets very anxious about that (it took her literal months to look at her AMC10 results), I'd just trusted her sense of how she'd done (as she is extremely accurate about such things). Finally I got her MAA password and looked at it, and she had scored 14 points. It took another couple of days before she was comfortable with my telling her. Anyway, she and I were both VERY surprised by this, and we had various theories (maybe that problem she geometry bashed she put down something weird and they took all the points off, which she's heard of happening?) but were kind of at a loss. E was kind of depressed (not horribly, but she was rather down) that she had apparently done so badly on at least one problem she thought she'd solved. We both kind of felt a bit down that in her quest to go to MOP she was more behind than we had thought she was. I also felt a bit bad that I'd made that last post and was thinking I'd have to amend it as "well, uh, she did fine, but not as well as I thought she did..."
I represented strongly to her that she should ask her competition manager (henceforth CM) at her high school what the breakdown of her score was (she herself only gets the raw score, not the breakdown by problem) because she should really know what problem(s) she had not done well on. So she managed to work through her anxiety (her brain: "there's a PROBLEM I didn't do WELL on!") to do that, and he emailed it: she had gotten 0 points on the Day 1 problem she had solved. She went back to the solution in case somehow she'd got it wrong, and she said to me, "no, I did solve it, my solution is very much like one of theirs."
So she asked CM if she could get the scan of her solution that he'd sent to MAA, or the papers if he still had them. Eventually we got the scan from him.
I looked at it, D looked at it, the local math circle coach looked at it. As far as any of us can tell (and the three of us ought to be able to tell, plus which E should be able to tell best of all, really), she got the problem 100% right. Could her notation have been explained a little better? Could she have cited her conditions a little more clearly? Sure, I guess, but not to the extent of losing all the points on the problem!
Anyway, she is going to email MAA (the administrators/graders of the test) tonight, I asked CM to contact MAA as well (he has not yet replied to me but I certainly don't expect him to during the school day), and that's where we are right now. I expect exactly nothing to come of it (and to be fair it wouldn't change anything materially if her score changed), but (as math circle coach pointed out) they need to know that they misgraded her problem! (She's not the only one who complained of this, she says; there are a couple of other people on AoPS who have also complained, one about that same problem and the other about a different problem that first day.)
Ironically, she's in a better headspace now knowing it was misgraded, because that was clearly NOT her fault, lol.
2.
So I have been making statements for years about A's school that no one there learns any math until they get to AwesomeTeacher (AT). Because I run math team for the 4th-6th graders, I can see first-hand how good they are or aren't at math, and I also have been seeing A's work (or lack thereof) for the last couple of years. (Now he's with AT and I get to see that he's doing work, it's like night and day.) And also because I run math team, other parents tend to complain to me about their kids not knowing any math. (E, who has extremely good luck, got the last good math teacher who quit right before she started taking classes with AT, so this wasn't a problem for her.) I have told any staff who will listen (and some who won't) about this, including AT, whom I now count as a friend. AT, who is a very nice person, has always tried to talk me down and tell me that it can't be as bad as all that. (And note that this is actually supposed to be a "gifted" school, so you would expect the kids to generally be better at math, though being "gifted" doesn't necessarily mean "good at math.")
Well. AT has had a class this year that she has told me confidentially is a bit frustrating, because it's supposed to be a prealgebra class but she's finding she can't actually get to the prealgebra part because she has to teach them all the stuff before prealgebra. First trimester (right after school started) the kids in her classes were scoring anywhere between 50% and 99% on the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) standardized test (the percentage meaning, as those of you who have done school standardized testing may remember, the percentage of kids that age who score below the kid in question), where most of the kids were closer to 50%, with two kids (who both do math outside of school) at 99%.
They just took the third-trimester standardized testing and all of her students scored above 90%.
Now, AT really is a fantastic teacher, but... she now believes me that there's something really hinky going on with math at this school before they get to her.
3. This morning was Mathcounts nationals countdown round! E has been looking forward to this for weeks on end, despite the fact she is no longer in middle school and has never gone to nationals herself, and would have tried to watch as much live as she could, except that she actually had an AP exam this morning. So our family is gonna watch it tonight, and until then she has turned off Discord and google chat so no one spoils her. I think it's hilarious and fun that E thinks of math competitions like most people think of sports competitions -- and so do I, I've always been like that too, so it's something we have in common too :) (D does not think about it quite like that, although he doesn't mind watching with us. I suppose reasonable people don't, heh.)
The exam is two days, and she got out having solved one problem Day 1 and two problems on Day 2. (This will be relevant later.) Each problem is 7 points, so that's a total of 21 points. She looked at the solutions and they lined up with what she had done. And when awards came out, she had got the lowest-tier award, which I think is approximately 14-21 points, so that was all as we had expected. That's when I made the last post.
However... I must admit here that she and I had not yet seen her actual results, because she gets very anxious about that (it took her literal months to look at her AMC10 results), I'd just trusted her sense of how she'd done (as she is extremely accurate about such things). Finally I got her MAA password and looked at it, and she had scored 14 points. It took another couple of days before she was comfortable with my telling her. Anyway, she and I were both VERY surprised by this, and we had various theories (maybe that problem she geometry bashed she put down something weird and they took all the points off, which she's heard of happening?) but were kind of at a loss. E was kind of depressed (not horribly, but she was rather down) that she had apparently done so badly on at least one problem she thought she'd solved. We both kind of felt a bit down that in her quest to go to MOP she was more behind than we had thought she was. I also felt a bit bad that I'd made that last post and was thinking I'd have to amend it as "well, uh, she did fine, but not as well as I thought she did..."
I represented strongly to her that she should ask her competition manager (henceforth CM) at her high school what the breakdown of her score was (she herself only gets the raw score, not the breakdown by problem) because she should really know what problem(s) she had not done well on. So she managed to work through her anxiety (her brain: "there's a PROBLEM I didn't do WELL on!") to do that, and he emailed it: she had gotten 0 points on the Day 1 problem she had solved. She went back to the solution in case somehow she'd got it wrong, and she said to me, "no, I did solve it, my solution is very much like one of theirs."
So she asked CM if she could get the scan of her solution that he'd sent to MAA, or the papers if he still had them. Eventually we got the scan from him.
I looked at it, D looked at it, the local math circle coach looked at it. As far as any of us can tell (and the three of us ought to be able to tell, plus which E should be able to tell best of all, really), she got the problem 100% right. Could her notation have been explained a little better? Could she have cited her conditions a little more clearly? Sure, I guess, but not to the extent of losing all the points on the problem!
Anyway, she is going to email MAA (the administrators/graders of the test) tonight, I asked CM to contact MAA as well (he has not yet replied to me but I certainly don't expect him to during the school day), and that's where we are right now. I expect exactly nothing to come of it (and to be fair it wouldn't change anything materially if her score changed), but (as math circle coach pointed out) they need to know that they misgraded her problem! (She's not the only one who complained of this, she says; there are a couple of other people on AoPS who have also complained, one about that same problem and the other about a different problem that first day.)
Ironically, she's in a better headspace now knowing it was misgraded, because that was clearly NOT her fault, lol.
2.
So I have been making statements for years about A's school that no one there learns any math until they get to AwesomeTeacher (AT). Because I run math team for the 4th-6th graders, I can see first-hand how good they are or aren't at math, and I also have been seeing A's work (or lack thereof) for the last couple of years. (Now he's with AT and I get to see that he's doing work, it's like night and day.) And also because I run math team, other parents tend to complain to me about their kids not knowing any math. (E, who has extremely good luck, got the last good math teacher who quit right before she started taking classes with AT, so this wasn't a problem for her.) I have told any staff who will listen (and some who won't) about this, including AT, whom I now count as a friend. AT, who is a very nice person, has always tried to talk me down and tell me that it can't be as bad as all that. (And note that this is actually supposed to be a "gifted" school, so you would expect the kids to generally be better at math, though being "gifted" doesn't necessarily mean "good at math.")
Well. AT has had a class this year that she has told me confidentially is a bit frustrating, because it's supposed to be a prealgebra class but she's finding she can't actually get to the prealgebra part because she has to teach them all the stuff before prealgebra. First trimester (right after school started) the kids in her classes were scoring anywhere between 50% and 99% on the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) standardized test (the percentage meaning, as those of you who have done school standardized testing may remember, the percentage of kids that age who score below the kid in question), where most of the kids were closer to 50%, with two kids (who both do math outside of school) at 99%.
They just took the third-trimester standardized testing and all of her students scored above 90%.
Now, AT really is a fantastic teacher, but... she now believes me that there's something really hinky going on with math at this school before they get to her.
3. This morning was Mathcounts nationals countdown round! E has been looking forward to this for weeks on end, despite the fact she is no longer in middle school and has never gone to nationals herself, and would have tried to watch as much live as she could, except that she actually had an AP exam this morning. So our family is gonna watch it tonight, and until then she has turned off Discord and google chat so no one spoils her. I think it's hilarious and fun that E thinks of math competitions like most people think of sports competitions -- and so do I, I've always been like that too, so it's something we have in common too :) (D does not think about it quite like that, although he doesn't mind watching with us. I suppose reasonable people don't, heh.)
no subject
(I've been conflicted about whether or not to return to grading the USA(J)MO, which I last did in 2020 / whether or not to encourage friends and colleagues to do so. On the one hand, USAMO grading is rather grind-y and not enough different from my day job, any I feel like I've done enough volunteer work for the MAA olympiads what with having been on the problem committee for 6 years as a postdoc when I probably should have been doing stuff that would have been better for my career. On the other hand, the number of people who get to take the USAMO is currently constrained by the number of graders, and so I'd like to make the USAMO accessible to more people. On the third hand, I get the impression the MAA doesn't really have their act together as well recently, specifically concerning the recent increase in cheating, and that makes it less appealing to me.)
3. This is totally my family also! Though in some ways more with the National Spelling Bee (which both my sister and I competed in) which we still watch live on TV. But the year my sister was in 8th grade, they decided to show the (taped) MathCounts National Countdown during the lunch break of the National Spelling Bee, so my sister found a TV in the spelling bee hotel to watch it during rounds with some of her Bee friends.
no subject
Some of this is part of why the MOP "how to write proofs" class has always started with "assume that your grader is lazy and stupid"
Hee! E has definitely taken that to heart from this whole experience. A good lesson.
On the third hand, I get the impression the MAA doesn't really have their act together as well recently, specifically concerning the recent increase in cheating
Yeah, I have definitely been getting that impression. I mean, as we've established before, what I see is a very small and biased part of what may actually be going on ;) but it just seems... not great. So yeah, I can see why people don't really want to do it. (I'm myself, on a much smaller level, trying to juggle volunteering for math coaching at my kid's school, which I enjoy, with dealing with all the associated crap that I don't enjoy due to the school being so disorganized... yeah, if I wasn't already doing it I'm not sure I would take it on, or counsel someone else to.)
3. :D Oh cool! Neither my kids nor I have done any kind of Spelling Bee -- my school didn't do it, and I'm not sure if my kids even would have if they'd had the chance, but the person who was going to run it at their school ended up leaving -- but I could imagine it would be very interesting and dramatic to watch.
no subject
They just took the third-trimester standardized testing and all of her students scored above 90%.
Wow, way to go Awesome Teacher!
(I have, annoyingly, had encounters with teachers who took "gifted school" as a hint that they therefore did not need to work as hard because the kids would teach themselves. It wasn't even necessarily laziness -- in several cases it was, but one teacher seemed to genuinely have this as a philosophy. That was at the high school level, so more maturity, but it was also an introductory Chemistry class, and, like, you've still got to teach them the basics, lady!)
So our family is gonna watch it tonight, and until then she has turned off Discord and google chat so no one spoils her.
That is adorable! <3
no subject
Heh, when Awesome Teacher talked to me about it she said, "I said to myself, 'wow, I must be a really great teacher!'" But her point was that she's not doing anything with this class that anyone else couldn't do -- she's literally going through a textbook with them and giving them very-low-key assessments every weeks. (She IS a great teacher who has a special gift for running with the kids' interests and digging more deeply, but she hasn't been able to do that with this particular class because they've needed so much foundational work.)
(K)
(Anonymous) 2025-05-13 04:30 am (UTC)(link)But if E does get a response, please tell us! Even if this doesn't make a difference for E's outcome, there could be other kids for whom it's the difference between making MOP and not.
I sympathize soooo much with AT! I wonder if she'll end up taking my route of gradually increasing assessment across the school so that she can prove there's a problem. Maybe I should meet her this summer?
Re: (K)
So someone from the MAA did write back the competition manager and basically said, "the problem was uploaded correctly and graded, and we don't do regrades," which was disappointing but what I was expecting. I do appreciate they checked that it was uploaded correctly, which we had also wondered about.
(I told E she is going to have to make CM cookies or something, he has been great through this whole thing.)
There was one kid, E said, who posted to either Discord or AoPS (I forget which) saying they had missed MOP because of their grading. I think that was the kid who had got IMO kids to check their work to make sure it was correct. That seems incredibly frustrating, and I hope at least that kid gets through to SOMEONE (although it sounds like they got roughly the same response). E and I have talked about how one big part of the impetus for communicating with MAA, even though she's not herself materially affected, is that if they get enough complaints, maybe they'll realize something is actually wrong :P
I... can't believe we've never talked about your experiences with assessment?! I want to hear all about it!!
As you have correctly intuited, AT is really great about continually assessing her kids (she gives them a low-key-this-is-not-a-test assessment every week! so she actually always knows what her kids know or don't know!) and everyone else at this school is NOT. I was about to write that I have no idea how the rest of them keep track of what the kids know and don't know, but actually I do: they have no idea. :P Oh gosh, if she could institute more assessment, or talk the new head (who is, I think, amenable to this kind of thing) into it, that would be amazing.
You would probably like AT a lot, and I know she'd like you. I will see if she'll be around this summer. She's also friends with math circle leader whom you've met, which is actually how I met her!
Re: (K)
(Anonymous) 2025-05-14 01:29 am (UTC)(link)Oh man, assessment. I have spreadsheets, and graphs, and am part of a slow school culture change that will hopefully start catching students who are behind sooner. I actually worry about this, because it does work in opposition to exploratory math work, and it's hard to protect the exploration time.
I would love to meet AT if she's around this summer :) I did something very similar to her weekly non-tests with my students last semester; we had little check-in quizzes at the beginning of every single class. (With most classes that frequency isn't necessary, but with that particular class, I really had to worry about whether they understood a topic that I'd taught them the day before.)
Re: (K)
Hmm. I see what you mean about exploratory math work, but right now the pendulum is tipped too far the other way -- she hasn't been able to do exploratory work with this class (which is also her forte, and which worked quite well with the previous class E was in which consisted of transfers who knew a lot already) not because there's too much assessment but because the kids don't know enough! I suppose it's always hard to keep a proper balance...
no subject
2. Wow!
No, okay, those are almost opposite types of wow--I am simultaneously horrified that E's problem was misgraded and really glad that it was possible to step through what occurred, and also, yikes for the extra efforts of catching up those students and yay for AT's patient hard work.
3. Hope E enjoys watching, especially. (Hope all of you enjoy, but the no-spoilers thing is cute!)
no subject
Really glad we have AT around, anyway...
3. We watched last night and it was really fun! (Hilariously, I myself was spoiled for at least the champion due to being on some Mathcounts mailing list, but she was successfully unspoiled until afterwards, when she retired to her room to read ALL the math-competition chatter online.)
no subject
no subject