MathCounts

A large number of students have ‘strong feelings’ for academics, but mathematics is a strong hit subject, infamous for being abhorred with a burning passion and causing even the brightest people to struggle. However, here at DaVinci Academy, there is a small group of students who are willing to conquer the advanced kind for fun and even compete.

MathCounts is an annual competition for middle school students that teaches them material not normally covered in the traditional curriculum. According to teacher-coach Ms. Micki Balaich, the formatting and excessive amounts of fun are to blame. She enjoys it herself because it allows students to challenge themselves and can assist in future learning.

The questions aren’t meant to be hard. – Ms. Balaich

The program is formatted not to teach concepts and formulas, but to challenge students by presenting them “with a broad variety of problems and scenarios in different variations.” Throughout the year, they are taught multiple methods of approaching problems, and during the competition, have to determine which one to use. Sometimes the task is difficult, almost impossible, causing students to become overwhelmed and overthink the problem. Ms. Balaich and previous competitors have all personally experienced it and recommend breaking it down into small chunks, preferably in the most simplified form.

Another difficulty in solving the problems is that participants never know what concepts they’ll be questioned on. Students participate from various grades and math classes, and so the competition isn’t geared towards a specific group. Topics as high as trigonometry, which isn’t even mentioned until Secondary Math II (10th grade), have been assigned. Luckily, there is no calculus.

Nonetheless, participating in MathCounts, whether as a competitor or student-coach, prepares you for future learning in your actual math classes. For those ahead of their peers in mathematics classes (which our two interviewees are), they would learn the same exact thing or a related topic a few months later and master it. It also helps them in the sense that they know what to do in situations with complex problems.

It all started a week before the 2012-2013 school year began, when Ms. Balaich was asked about the program on behalf of Parker Swanson, then a seventh grader, who had previously competed in his elementary school.

Ms. Balaich had never heard about it, but upon further research, became interested and advised Swanson throughout the year, eventually leading him to the state level.

In the coming years, she has increased her team size (which is capped at four, as per competition rules) but has been unsuccessful in making it past the regional level. Swanson believes that is “not due to a lack of intelligence but rather too much.” He explained that when multiple people are working on a problem, instead of working together to find a solution, they will get different answers and argue as to which one is correct. This is a lesson well learned for any group assignment.

This year, the team consists of ten students, which means that there will be a school competition in the early winter. Isabelle “Izzie” Herzog and Anna Johnston, two of the student-coaches, have previously competed and are excited for this because they didn’t get to experience it and want to, at least to some degree.

Mary Grace Bourn, eighth grader, is a first-time competitor, but has some knowledge and experience from participating in Academic Pentathlon, the primary version of Decathlon. After attending some of the MathCounts meetings, she concludes that they are very similar and she can use the same strategies. For example, she doesn’t spend a large amount of time on solving, but rather guesses, and that has produced first-place scores. In MathCounts, guessing can sometimes be the only method to solving a problem.