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[quote=Anonymous][quote=pettifogger][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So, to sum up, a math teacher who can “scout” his own students from a bunch of college professors’ kids wins math competitions? Wow. Call me when he gets a random group of kids and can do the same thing. [/quote]

You are missing the point.  Why is his team dominating all the other teams who also have top talent?

The answer is because he taps that potential at an early age, pushes those kids to maximizes and reach their full potential at every stage.  Rinse and repeat.
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Same as in the movie Stand & Deliver, which was based on an actual teacher. He achieved crazy impressive results with kids that most others had written off.[/quote]

I'm quite surprised that given how interesting and catchy this article is, nobody here seems to have bothered to do a bit of research and just simply believed the headline "How a Public School in Florida Built [b]America’s Greatest Math Team[/b]" :

When someone claims something is the greatest, one should instinctively ask, by what measure(s)? Reading the article it seems obvious that is based on their teams winning the national championship of Mu Alpha Theta. What does that mean exactly? Or, by what measure exactly is winning Mu Alpha Theta equivalent to being the greatest? Well if we assume Mu Alpha Theta is the most difficult math exam given to high schoolers, then we can conclude that... or can we? First off, if one looks at sample questions from past MAT exams and does a comparison with sample questions from other top high school math contests, one finds that MAT questions are significantly less challenging on average. But let's assume for a second that MAT questions are right there at the top of the challenge level. We [i]still [/i]cannot conclude anything meaningful about the greatest without checking who actually participated in these competitions which the Gainsville team won. (It turns out that not many top math teams at elite high schools are that interested in MAT, their normal target is the AMC exams (because they lead to the Olympiad and ultimately the IMO), as well as HMMT, ARML and a few other contests that are historically ultra competitive, prestigious, and known to be difficult). Additionally, if you look at MAT participation rates, most schools come from Florida; it is something that is very popular there, but not necessarily in the whole country.

I don't want to detract from Buchholz and his math team's achievements (which are still impressive), but calling them greatest by the WSJ is not only meaningless without specific measures, but also just plain misinformed when compared to other elite high school math contests such as the AMCs and HMMT. Even at the middle school level, one will find many challenging questions on recent years of the national Mathcounts round that are significantly more difficult than what is found on the MAT.

The rest of the information about how he did it is now easy to piece together. They were obviously able to win so much because not only were they [i]not [/i]competing at the highest levels as described above, but they also dedicated an [i]incredible [/i]amount of time to practicing MAT questions/topics. For those who have not looked into the details, Buchholz shortly after finding success was at some point given thousands of dollars in funding by private individuals to continue the ability to win, and has consequently used that funding to grow and build a math culture over the years at the school (not unlike what a competitive sports team coach would do). That means that once he became well known for winning, he used that to tap into the most promising students from elementary and middle school to ensure they attend his math team via tryouts/tests, he regularly runs quite long summer camps that meet for multiple weeks and multiple hours a day working on math contests, and he has even been allowed to offer high school courses taken for credit at the school which literally are built from MAT problems (i.e a precalc course would teach the same topics a normal standard precalc course does, but using MAT problems and similar other contest problems, one can see these course descriptions in the school handbook). Additionally, many of these kids are from well off families, which is no surprise, as others above have mentioned, so this is not even close to a Stand and Deliver situation with "written off" kids.

This is all available on the web by googling and is quite interesting, so I'm still surprised nobody filled in these details. Again, I don't want to detract from what he has achieved which is still quite hard to do, as well as the fact that these kids obviously have learned a lot of math beneficial to them later in life, which is a great thing. (I would love to have my kids attend his program instead of FCPS, if I had the choice). But people should in general in this country call out meaningless comparisons and fill in the details more, otherwise we run the risk of continuing to become a misinformed society.[/quote]

+ Terrific post!

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