Years ago Strider participated in the MathCounts program, and after seeing the benefit, I thought it would be good for Colsen to try it, too, now that he is beginning Middle School. After the first team meeting Colsen was quite convinced otherwise.
All year he has felt very "stupid" as he would say, since most of the math is challenging even for 8th graders. (In fact, most of the math is quite challenging for ME -- and I'm used to SAT and precalculus problems with the students I tutor) But, I told him to stick with it anyway since he was bound to learn some useful things.
He's been anxious about it all along, knowing that the big competition was looming. His coach reassured him that the team needed him - - without him they would have to compete with a man down -- so any points he could contribute would all be bonus. We tried to tell him there was NO pressure on him at all. I told him his goal could be to just score ONE point on the tests.
Well the big day finally arrived and the team assembled with a whole bunch of other teams representing most of the middle schools in the greater Charlotte area, at UNC-Charlotte. There were a few rounds of competition, and as it turned out Colsen's team finished in 10th place... which was quite good considering they had 3 6th-graders and only 1 8th-grader, and presumably most of the other teams were comprised of all 8th-graders.
Poppa hung out with Colsen most of the day and the other kids and I just arrived at the end, long enough for the "speed round" where team representatives had buzzers and answered word problems in 5 seconds or less. Pretty amazing minds are growing here in Charlotte.
This is the only picture we got of Colsen from the day -- Miles shot it from the back of the auditorium:
At the end of the day both Colsen and his friend Ethan were quite enthusiastic about the experience and talked about it all the way home -- and how they can't wait to compete again next year!
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