THE PROBLEM SOLVERS
During pandemic, math league finds new solution to carry on
GREENWICH — Once a month, from October through March, for the last three years, William Berkley and a handful of his Brunswick School classmates would board a bus bound for Wilton High School.
The school was roughly a middle point for other students throughout southwestern Connecticut, who would converge at least six times a year after school in the WHS cafeteria to consort and compete.
Those meetings, organized by the Fairfield County Math League, a federation of more than 30 local public and private high schools, were important to Berkley and his math-minded peers. Math league provided an extracurricular resume boost, an after-school exercise for enthusiasts looking to sharpen their skills, and a fertile social landscape to which many looked forward.
“There is something really special about how this used to happen,” said Berkley, a Brunswick senior.
But nothing was the same in 2020. And like in school, sports, other extracurriculars and life in general, the COVID-19 pandemic prompted significant change. Gone were the days of pizza, snacks and fraternizing between rounds of math competitions. Absent also this year would be the written tests, the monthly bus rides and in-person practice. Amid a pandemic, the FCML would no longer function the way it had since at least the early 1970s.
“Over the summer, it just became evident to us that we were never going to be able to run in-person matches because all schools were restricting trips,” said Michael Allwood, chair of Brunswick’s math department and coach of the math team.
The changes have not been solely negative, though. Coaches and students have found innovative new ways for the league to thrive entirely online.
The shift has been successful, Allwood and other coaches said, but the adaptations were significant. Only positive integers are accepted on Google Forms, through which tests are administered, so questions with answers that contained fractions, decimals or square roots had to be reworked. And students are also now permitted to use calculators, textbooks and the internet.
Nevertheless, Allwood and Greenwich High School math teacher and coach Gordon Jones said the integrity of the tests is as strong as ever. And students said the quality of questions is on par with last year.
“The problem writers designed really good questions where it’s actually really difficult to use online materials,” said Ali Hindy, also a Brunswick senior. “Even if you’re given a calculator, the questions are designed so that you have to actually have to use intuition and math skills. It’s a similar difficulty as last year. It may be even a little harder.”
Bringing the A-Team
Other aspects of competitions have remained consistent. Each school still fields an “A-Team,” comprised of its top six students each month. Teams can bring as many additional “B Team” students as they want, but only the performances of A-Team members count toward the final score.
Competitions consist of six increasingly challenging rounds, beginning with arithmetic and moving toward algebra, geometry and, ultimately, calculus. These individual rounds have remained mostly untouched, though. And in an effort to curb answer sharing, problem writers create variations of the same question each round.
And though virtual competitions’ fidelity to past in-person matches was a priority for the FCML, certain other aspects were more difficult to emulate — particularly the collaborative team round that concludes the event.
“Now we do the team round through Zoom, and it just feels different because everyone isn’t sitting around a table doing math together anymore,” said Angela Zhang, a Greenwich Academy junior.
“I miss doing math surrounded by friends and solving problems together the most,” she added. “Also, I just like hearing people talk about their answers when they are comparing them, because you hear things like, ‘Oh man, I was so close,’ or ‘This round was really hard.’ And you can get a sense of how others felt about that round and identify with them.”
Fewer math athletes
Participation is also down, at least at some
schools. Jones, whose Greenwich High team is perennially at the top of the league and currently leads, said he has seen a considerable dip in the number of students at practices and matches. Recruitment has taken a hit during the pandemic.
“I think what has happened is this year, because we couldn’t have the club fair and we couldn’t go around and invite certain students onto the team, that the team is smaller than it normally would be,” Jones said. “That’s a change. We only have about 10 active students on the math team right now, which is 40 percent” of past years.
In a pre-pandemic world, Jones would seek out “double, triple and quadruple-jumpers” — underclassmen who are two, three or four years above grade level in math. But he has been limited to do that this year.
Still, he’s not worried about his program. Greenwich High is currently leading the league and is an FCML juggernaut.
According to Jones, his team has won the county title — in the state’s toughest league — 11 of the last 12 years and the state title 10 out of 11 years. At New England regionals, they often finish atop the leaderboard, excepting a group of Boston-area schools, which Jones said produce some of the most formidable math league teams in the area.
That success should continue, he said, so long as he can return to recruiting post-pandemic.
“That’s sort of the key to the consistency,” Jones said. “You get these kids when they’re freshman. ... There are so many clubs at the school, that if you don’t get the kids attention early it’s tough to get them on the team.”
Those students, once engaged, grow considerably each year, benefiting greatly from the camaraderie of like-minded students and coaches and the nights and weekends spent going over problems. Any lapse in competition could have led to arrested development, Allwood feared, which only underlined the importance of persevering this season.
“Had we not done this, every one of those students would have lost that growth they get through math team,” said Allwood, whose Brunswick team is only slightly behind Greenwich High this season, in third place after three matches. “They get a lot out of this.”
For Berkley and Hindy, at least, the possibility of a league-wide cancellation seemed very possible. Both recalled the uncertainty they felt over the summer over whether matches would be held.
“Although it hasn’t been perfect — because if you ask anyone I think we’d rather be back in that Wilton High cafeteria — we’ve still been able to have a great experience,” Berkley said. “We still run practice all the time, the matches have been very competitive and there’s a lot of integrity in the league. There’s a shared sense this is something we enjoy and people are aware this is something that can be lost really quickly.”