It was 2:45PM on Monday, September 19, the first meeting of the
Cambridgeport Math Olympiads club. The students, huddled over notebooks
with pencils scratching, were already "in training" on a word problem:
"In three bowling games, Alice scores 139, 143, and 144. What score will
Alice need in a fourth game in order to have an average score of 145
for all four games?"
At
the whiteboard was Mary Elizabeth Cranton, Cambridge's own
"tri-mathlete": Cranton is Cambridgeport's Math Olympiads coordinator,
one of its 1st, 4th, and 5th grade math teacher, and a parent of three
students at the school. "What are general problem-solving strategies?"
she asked, marker in hand. Students called out "Multiples!" and "Use
equations that you know!" Throughout the practice students added other
tips to the board, such as "Draw a picture," "Make a quick diagram" and
"Work backwards."
For the 21 Cambridgeport students who signed
up, this year's Mathematical Olympiads for Elementary and Middle Schools
(MOEMS) will prove no less challenging than last year's, when two team
members ranked in the top 10 percent nationally. Cambridgeport competes
with thousands of students through the MOEMS, which distributes contest
questions five times per year and awards badges or pins to winners in
the top 50 percent, 20 percent, and 10 percent. Some school teams choose
only top performing students for competition, to raise overall school
rankings, but Cambridgeport allows all mathletes to enter.
The
five contest dates plus the weekly practice sessions are designed to
encourage enthusiasm for problem solving, deepen students' understanding
of math concepts, and help students consider concepts new to them.
Cranton likes how they challenge the kids with problems they may not
have seen before, ones even adults have trouble with. "In the classroom
we can't spend an entire class period on just one or two problems," she
says. "They're learning many other skills and pieces of math too."
Student
collaboration underlies every practice session, as it does all math
classes at Cambridgeport. On contest days, however, each student is on
his or her own to work through five questions in 26 minutes. "All that
matters for each problem is the correct answer," says Cranton. "I enter
online "yes" or "no" if they got it right. We go over them right
afterward—they go home pretty much knowing how they did."
Recording
the answers online also means each individual performance becomes part
of the statistics. "It's really interesting to be able to say to the
students, "Throughout the country only 4 percent of students got that
question right, however 70 percent got this other one right."
An
added challenge is not missing contest days. Once you miss one, you get
zero points (out of five) for that contest. "A very small number of
students in the country gets 25 points over the whole year," Cranton
says.
The MOEMS includes students from 4th through 8th grades,
with separate questions for older and younger students. For more info,
visit their
web site.