(no subject)
Apr. 29th, 2026 02:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnE:
WELL E MADE MOP
OKAY THEN LET'S GOOOOOOO
That is to say, she is one of... around 60 kids (around 10-15 girls) in the country who did well enough on the USA(J)MO (she took the USAJMO) test to attend the Math Olympiad Program (basically Olympiad training camp). This is pretty crazy stuff. It's sort of surreal. As some of you know, she's wanted this for a while and has worked pretty hard for it and is really really happy about it. She did not think she was going to make it and had mostly-convinced me she wasn't going to, and we had had a ton of talks with her about how it was really okay if she didn't make it and the vast majority of kids don't make it and were and are fine and etc. (We knew she had the skill level that it was possible, but also that she didn't have the skill level where it would be a foregone conclusion, and she felt bad about the first day (see below), and in fact she did have a lot of luck again with the problems breaking well with respect to geometry, which is her nemesis.) As far as we can tell from the thresholds kids have been collating online, she made the girls' cutoff but not the general cutoff. On the other hand, she realized she had screwed up something dumb with five minutes left on the clock the first day, and on the second day hastily sketched out what she is pretty sure was a correct solution to another problem that got no points but that she feels could have with more time to rewrite her solution, so she feels she could have also easily done better in a very slightly alternate universe :) I hope it is as fun as she's made it out to be in her head :P
Also, E and I need to work on her social skills SO much, omg. For various reasons I've been spending more time with her in the last couple of weeks seeing her interact with others and ack.
Also, why does my child not want to tell me what her friends' names are?? This is irritating because I am doing things like coordinating travel with a couple of other families and I know one of them she knows from camp but I don't know which one!!
A: A is also (we think) going to a math summer program! It's a week long, a parent goes with the kid, and apparently they do cool stuff like hiking and white water rafting. D is going with as he will enjoy all of that immensely. I say "we think" he is going because we got the notification that he had been accepted and then we haven't heard anything else for, like, almost a month. I wrote them after a week asking if we'd missed anything and got the response that we hadn't, so... I guess... that's OK? Maybe I will ping them again? And/or I guess I will just buy them plane tickets and if they end up somehow not going to the camp maybe they'll just... go camping? [ETA: Welp, apparently posting this and perhaps comment good wishes were the key! About an hour after I posted, I got the registration etc. info. So I guess he's going!]
...it is going to be a mess, logistically speaking, to get both kids to all the places they are supposed to go. It is possible with two adults! But today I had to make a spreadsheet to keep track of all the travel and which tickets I've bought already and which ones I still need to buy.
Also, A's school is... as far as I know... not imploding, but the 7/8 teacher is not coming back next year. My vague understanding is that half the parents are up in arms about this and the other half are relieved. But hey there are a few weeks left of school, there's time for more implosion to happen!
Also also. A's school does Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) standardized testing twice a year. The results come out as percentages compared to other kids who take this test. This week was testing. A came out with a 99% "achievement" score in math (typical for him -- presumably meaning he scored higher than 99% of the other kids taking it) and a 1% (!) "growth" score (...not so typical! -- presumably meaning he learned less this year than 99% of the other kids taking it), which made both D and me howl with laughter when AwesomeTeacher, very concerned, emailed us these results. (We have both observed a ton of growth in his math ability this year, partially because he's learning geometry which he didn't really know anything about before, but also he's particularly gotten much better in written and oral communication, which I suppose MAP wouldn't measure at all.) Apparently all the other grade-level classes did what she expected, but the few kids in this one class which works above grade level all had anomalously low growth scores. She found some evidence that MAP has revamped their algorithms so they give more "grade-level" questions on a subject, and it seems reasonable that this would then lead to lower-than-usual scores for kids working above grade level.
Me: So I've been teaching youth (11-14, in this case) Sunday School for the past 2 1/2 years. A couple of months ago the Church announced that they were letting Sunday School presidents be women for the first time ever. (My church! Vaguely trying to get with the twentieth century here! Did not get the memo we have been in the twenty-first century for a while now!) Two days later I was asked if I could meet with the bishop, which turned out to be him extending the call to be the Sunday School president. Your question probably is: what does a Sunday School president actually do? Well, I guess I'll let you know when I find out. I know I am supposed to run teacher training ("Teachers Council") meetings, which I am going to start figuring out this week. And be an all-purpose sub when that's needed. And some other little random things, like making sure that roll gets taken and collected. So it's not that much! I think it's likely to be less work than actually teaching, because prepping lessons takes a lot of time for me. But in the weird sort of hierarchy that is my church, it's sort of this big deal? Especially because women couldn't do it before!
no subject
Date: 2026-04-29 10:28 pm (UTC)LOLWTF at women only now getting to be Sunday School presidents.
no subject
Date: 2026-04-29 11:19 pm (UTC)Yeah so it's so LOLWTF that I had not actually realized this was not a thing until the announcement came out! (Though people who pay more attention than I do knew this. I've had a lot of women at church tell me they are very happy about this whole thing :) )
no subject
Date: 2026-04-29 10:44 pm (UTC)(Heh, re: buying plane tickets--I guess it's an issue that the camp organizers don't have, but agreed, getting something set up seems wise.)
no subject
Date: 2026-04-29 11:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-04-30 03:01 am (UTC)Ah, a relief!
no subject
Date: 2026-04-30 03:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-04-29 11:25 pm (UTC)The summer math program with a parent and hiking sounds pretty cool too!
From my limited experience with Sunday school in UU and UCC contexts, it seems miraculous that your church has been able to keep a sufficient level of male involvement in Sunday School to make it this long without having female Sunday School presidents before. But congratulations on that too. I hope it goes well, and that you don't encounter any weird hurdles from being the first one.
no subject
Date: 2026-04-29 11:33 pm (UTC)it seems miraculous that your church has been able to keep a sufficient level of male involvement in Sunday School to make it this long without having female Sunday School presidents before.
I laughed at this because various people are absolutely speculating that that's what's driving the change, not that they have decided to better/more equitable about this stuff (although to be fair I do think that's at least part of it). It's definitely the case in our ward that we don't have enough men to fill all the spots that need men, which is basically why they needed to put a woman in right away :)
no subject
Date: 2026-04-30 12:23 am (UTC)(I peeked at the results a couple days ago because I was curious, and I saw that E did good, but couldn't tell if it was good enough without knowing more details of the selection process. Also, I know lots of smart math people for whom olympiad geometry was their weak spot, including the current IMO team leader! It wasn't my weak point, but also not my strong point -- if anything, inequalities were my nemesis, but fashions have changed so that that type of problem is less common these days.)
no subject
Date: 2026-04-30 03:53 am (UTC)I do think it's much better that they are inviting more girls now -- it just seems like a much nicer atmosphere. (Though... yeah, I get a distinct impression the current situation has led to good adults not being involved with MOP who used to be and who did a lot of positive shaping of it. Again, of course, I'm mostly hearing this stuff third-hand ...)
I peeked at the results a couple days ago because I was curious
:) I heard Po-Shen Loh say at one of his talks where he was hanging out afterwards and answering questions -- I think at MP4G? -- that the selection process for the girls' cohort could be a little more heuristic... this was a couple of years ago too, but might not actually depend solely on a strict cutoff for them? do you know? But anyway E says all the girls at her level on JMO got invited :) (She made that level with a whole point to spare, lol.) (And at least one girl got invited, she says, who was in the level below that one.)
Ha, I appreciate that E is not the only one who is weak in geometry! <3
no subject
Date: 2026-04-30 12:00 pm (UTC)I personally thrived in the environment with just a few girls, but as you may have also heard, it was much worse not that long before my time. But between my first two years as staff we started inviting the girls' team, and that was one of the reasons (but not the only one) I was much happier my second year. I'm on a discord for past years' staff (where I am almost the oldest person around), so I have more direct sources and can confirm your impression. (It's not very lively from my perspective, though possibly there is more going on in channels I don't have access to.)
no subject
Date: 2026-04-30 07:16 pm (UTC)I have heard vague things about it being not that great with few/no girls, yeah -- though honestly I mostly was just extrapolating from my own experiences with math etc. competitions and also observing E in various groups with various gender distributions. I feel like with a reasonable pool of girls, they start influencing the culture in ways that are noticeable and, well, civilizing, whereas with a very small cohort it can be very hit or miss what it's like for those kids. I personally usually also was good with such environments with just a couple of girls, but in retrospect environments with more girls were better for me :) And they seem to be significantly better for E as well.
no subject
Date: 2026-04-30 01:52 pm (UTC)One thing I admire about the LDS is that the "continuing revelation" thing means they can always just admit they did something wrong and change it, just like that. So, welcome to the Century of the Fruitbat, and I bet you will be the best Sunday School president ever. Can we look forward to a very detailed LDS Sunday School!Saffy Walden AU next year?
no subject
Date: 2026-04-30 07:33 pm (UTC)Haha, yeah. LOL, Saffy Walden as an LDS Sunday School teacher! Wow, that would be something. I confess my mind is kind of breaking at the idea of Incandescent-style Sunday School... the demons of course would be theological entities, then... actually, this might not be a bad fit for LDS religious culture. You might get very practical and actionable advice with how to deal with your demon infestation, with a top-down structure that, when it works, really works, and you get these meetinghouses that are more pristine and demon-proofed than anywhere else, but then also some meetinghouses that have the equivalent of maw-mouths under them (yes mixing canons now), and also at the same time all of this is with a lot of theory where secular/other-religious demon experts just can't figure out how it makes any sense.
no subject
Date: 2026-04-30 11:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-05-01 04:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-04-30 11:06 pm (UTC)And congrats to A as well. (The growth score thing seems very silly… that’s got to be some kind of ceiling effect.). I hope the math camp is fun!
no subject
Date: 2026-05-01 04:17 am (UTC)Hee, yeah, it's definitely some kind of bizarre ceiling effect coming from the way they changed their questions around.
no subject
Date: 2026-04-30 11:48 pm (UTC)And yay for posting about it magically producing the confirmation of A's summer math camp. Hope that's fun too! And congrats to him on the test results! (the growth one seems very silly -- like, if someone's already at a high percentile and focusing on above-grade work that the test is not measuring... yeah XD)
no subject
Date: 2026-05-01 04:21 am (UTC)Hee, yeah, idk if your kids ever did these standardized tests -- I took a different one but with a very similar idea when I was a kid. It's not particularly odd to score in the 99th percentile if you're a little accelerated (since they give it to a very wide range of kids), but yeah, his growth percentile (which I never had) always comes out as rather low... it's never been as low as 1% before, though! XD
no subject
Date: 2026-05-02 07:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-05-03 08:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-05-01 05:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-05-02 04:38 pm (UTC)