Kids and math: three things
May. 12th, 2025 12:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahn1. 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.)
Re: (K)
Date: 2025-05-13 03:45 pm (UTC)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)
Date: 2025-05-14 01:29 am (UTC)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)
Date: 2025-05-14 03:54 pm (UTC)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...