by Catherine Pears
Editor-in-Chief
Walking into a recent Tuesday meeting for the math team, about twenty students have their heads to their papers, their eyes two inches from the desk, all focused on the problems in front of them. Although all of the WA math teachers would love for this to be a description of their classrooms, the students here are working diligently on a test to qualify for their upcoming meet.
Stacey Cronin, the math team’s coach, explained that each month the students take a test in order to be able to participate in the upcoming meet. After all the members have completed the test, captains Vivek Gaddam, Jade Yang, and Fred Yu grade them and the ten members with the highest scores participate in the next meet. However, the other members of the math team still participate in the meets.
“We can only take ten regulars and a bunch of other people can come as alternates. So they can get the test taking experience without having their scores count for this meet,” said Gaddam.
Gaddam, a junior at Westford Academy, has been on the math team since freshman year.
“Math has probably been my favorite subject since kindergarten. So that’s the thing I wanted to do. And math team is a good activity to put that knowledge to use,” Gaddam said.
Each week the math team has two meetings, every Tuesday and Wednesday. Most meetings are spent preparing for upcoming meets and working through problems members encounter.
“We have a bunch of little things going on,” said Gaddam. “We are really loose about who comes and who doesn’t, but those who come can do whatever they want. We can either work on practice problems for the qualifiers or we can do any practice problems that they bring from out of school.”
The image of the “mathletes,” presented by the film Mean Girls, can incorrectly influence our idea of what math meets are like. The monthly meets that the math team competes in can have up to eight teams, and some meets grow even larger.
“At the HMMT competition, which switches between Harvard and MIT- those are really hard- there can be between 100 and 200 teams of different sizes. Some teams come from China for the big HMMT,” said Gaddam.
For outsiders looking in on the “math world,” math meets can seem like a scary thing. However, Gaddam insists that any high school student could handle the problems.
“Some tests are harder than others, but basically you can take anyone from an Algebra 2 class and they should be able to do one or two problems from the meets if they really know the topic well,” Gaddam said.
Last month the WA math team attended a meet. No matter how the team performs, the meets are always a learning experience for team members.
“That was a good experience,” reflected Gaddam. “A lot of freshmen were interested and they know how it works now.”
Although the meets are challenging, and competition is stiff when faced with such intelligent students, the math team captains and members continue to look forward.
“Our team’s really young and we need more experience and time, but eventually we hope that we can become a really good team,” said Gaddam.
