Today we received back our Criterion G, with our teacher's comments. Upon further review of my Criterion, I realized that I was rather unclear with the terminology, so that the writing got confusing at times to one who was not familiar with the math team lingo. In addition, I tended to rant a little. Below is the edited Criterion:
G Identifying the Problem within a Social Context
Problem: It is difficult for students on the Mid-Pacific Math Team to find all of the information they need to properly prepare for math competitions.
Inadequacies of the Current Situation:
Math team students must spend inordinate amounts of time searching for reliable information they can use to help them study for the seven math competitions, or meets, which occur each school year. For each meet, a student who participates in a required three of the six possible events must take a ten minute test which contains problems pertaining to a specific mathematical category. Nearly all the problems require knowledge formulas or vocabulary pertaining to this topic, and students must sift through the pages of multiple textbooks before they are able to find the information they are looking for.
The fact that the topics are diverse, including problems from the subject areas of Algebra I and II, Geometry, Trigonometry, and Analytic Geometry, further complicates the issue. No one textbook contains all the information needed for a single meet. In fact, not even the textbooks which students are required to have for school include all of the information. Because of this, students must hunt down information, looking through older books which can only be found in the room of one teacher. This information can only be accessed after school, when the teacher is available, a time at which many students have other commitments.
And, as some students compete in events with information they may have never come across before, and have nowhere to access the information, studying is daunting task. While there are old tests, which provide answers to past questions, for students to study off of, students cannot begin to find a mathematical solution if they don’t understand what the questions are asking. Some of the terminology used in the events is such that one must know a good deal of vocabulary just to answer a simple question. As students go against competitors from other schools, knowing even the most basic terminology could be extremely helpful. If there was one cohesive source which contained all of the information needed, students could spend more time solving problems and less time looking for vocabulary.
End-User: Students on the math team of my school, Mid-Pacific.
