New Ideas for Next Year

I'll start listing what I've come up with or what others have proposed here.

- Going to Freshman honors geometry classes during the beginning of the school year to recruit potential freshman.
- Asking Algebra II and Geometry teachers about anybody who seems underchallenged in class, or who shows a genuine interest in math.
- A mandatory amount of practices before being eligible to sign up for a contest.
- Making a program which enables people to sign up for contests online.
- Making a score analyzer to make it easier to pick district teams and identify personal weaknesses.
- Practices every other day after school, each day with a specified subject ie. Thurs. is Science practice, Mon. is Math practice etc. In addition, one officer or high-scoring induvidual (200+ in Math, 200+ in NS, 150+ in Science, 170+ in calc.) should be assigned days to stay and teach.
- A practice logger so we can log who was at practice which can be used as a verifier for the online contest signup.

My only concern is that if there is too little interest shown next year, we might not have enough active members either join or show up for practices to implement these measures...

Any ones I missed?
Any new suggestions?

Ani wrote:I'll start listing what I've come up with or what others have proposed here.

- Going to Freshman honors geometry classes during the beginning of the school year to recruit potential freshman.
- Asking Algebra II and Geometry teachers about anybody who seems underchallenged in class, or who shows a genuine interest in math.
- A mandatory amount of practices before being eligible to sign up for a contest.
- Making a program which enables people to sign up for contests online.
- Making a score analyzer to make it easier to pick district teams and identify personal weaknesses.
- Practices every other day after school, each day with a specified subject ie. Thurs. is Science practice, Mon. is Math practice etc. In addition, one officer or high-scoring induvidual (200+ in Math, 200+ in NS, 150+ in Science, 170+ in calc.) should be assigned days to stay and teach.
- A practice logger so we can log who was at practice which can be used as a verifier for the online contest signup.

My only concern is that if there is too little interest shown next year, we might not have enough active members either join or show up for practices to implement these measures...

Any ones I missed?
Any new suggestions?

Bolded suggestions have not been attempted in past years, to my knowledge/memory.
-I'm not too sure how well asking teachers will work out, so I'll refrain from commenting either way on that subject.
-Score analyzer could easily be made by just shoving scores into a spreadsheet and graphing multiple line graphs. How/who you want to handle it is a separate matter though.

As for everything else...
-Making posters and visiting freshmen math classes is a good effort, but it rarely tends to attract people. You should still go through with it anyway, but don't expect membership numbers to change noticeably.
-The previous minimum was either one or two practices, but even then, people didn't really improve their scores with such a low number. The problem with having a high minimum is that you might unintentionally exclude people who simply can't go to that many practices, yet still try hard.
-The old math club website had a form for signing up for tournaments. Following a similar model, you could draw attention to these forums and hopefully spark more discussion, provided you plan on using them again next year, by simply including another section exclusively for tournament sign-ups.
-It's not a bad idea to have different days for specialized practice, but you'll inevitably notice that some days are more popular than others. Plus, schedule conflicts will hurt attendance a bit. However, the plan might work if you have two sections at practice: a general practice area and a specific subject area.
-We used to have a little sign-in booklet at practice to keep track of attendance, but it was slowly phased out of existence, since the book was essentially my name written over and over again. <_< In going with the forum tournament sign-ups idea though, you could have an officer or someone keep track of practice attendance and post said numbers under the tournament sign-ups section.

HTang wrote:

Ani wrote:I'll start listing what I've come up with or what others have proposed here.

- Going to Freshman honors geometry classes during the beginning of the school year to recruit potential freshman.
- Asking Algebra II and Geometry teachers about anybody who seems underchallenged in class, or who shows a genuine interest in math.
- A mandatory amount of practices before being eligible to sign up for a contest.
- Making a program which enables people to sign up for contests online.
- Making a score analyzer to make it easier to pick district teams and identify personal weaknesses.
- Practices every other day after school, each day with a specified subject ie. Thurs. is Science practice, Mon. is Math practice etc. In addition, one officer or high-scoring induvidual (200+ in Math, 200+ in NS, 150+ in Science, 170+ in calc.) should be assigned days to stay and teach.
- A practice logger so we can log who was at practice which can be used as a verifier for the online contest signup.

My only concern is that if there is too little interest shown next year, we might not have enough active members either join or show up for practices to implement these measures...

Any ones I missed?
Any new suggestions?

Bolded suggestions have not been attempted in past years, to my knowledge/memory.
-I'm not too sure how well asking teachers will work out, so I'll refrain from commenting either way on that subject.
-Score analyzer could easily be made by just shoving scores into a spreadsheet and graphing multiple line graphs. How/who you want to handle it is a separate matter though.

As for everything else...
-Making posters and visiting freshmen math classes is a good effort, but it rarely tends to attract people. You should still go through with it anyway, but don't expect membership numbers to change noticeably.
-The previous minimum was either one or two practices, but even then, people didn't really improve their scores with such a low number. The problem with having a high minimum is that you might unintentionally exclude people who simply can't go to that many practices, yet still try hard.
-The old math club website had a form for signing up for tournaments. Following a similar model, you could draw attention to these forums and hopefully spark more discussion, provided you plan on using them again next year, by simply including another section exclusively for tournament sign-ups.
-It's not a bad idea to have different days for specialized practice, but you'll inevitably notice that some days are more popular than others. Plus, schedule conflicts will hurt attendance a bit. However, the plan might work if you have two sections at practice: a general practice area and a specific subject area.
-We used to have a little sign-in booklet at practice to keep track of attendance, but it was slowly phased out of existence, since the book was essentially my name written over and over again. <_< In going with the forum tournament sign-ups idea though, you could have an officer or someone keep track of practice attendance and post said numbers under the tournament sign-ups section.

Firstly, I wasnt aware that people had attempted these before, did these practices just fade out of existance?
Michael is making the score analyzer, and we're going to try and make it calculate STD etc. so we hope it helps in picking teams.
On recruiting freshman:
- There were 5-6 freshmen in Algebra II this year, none joined math club. I tried dragging one, but he was busy with soccer. The others seemed rather free, and one had even done TMSCA in middle school for Baines. He wasnt aware that Elkins had a math club until March. Furthermore, he's in Al. 2, Chem I, and CS I as a freshman, making him an ideal pick. I think that if we were more aggressive in recruiting members, it might help, considering that I believe there is a lot of untapped talent. Even if membership doesnt change drastically, all we need are 3-4 freshmen who are dedicated to pulling the club forward.

On everything else:
- We'll have to see how the practices work out...it is a sticky issue, and we'll have to see how it works out... maybe exemptions for those who show score improvement? I mean, if they practice at home, it may work out just as well.
- What happened to the old math club website? I saw a link to it on wikipedia, but it seemed really inactive and only had five posts. Did people just lose interest?
I believe someone was still checking them as of June 2008, I wanted to tell him that these were the new forums, but I didnt have an account.
- lol, I remember that little booklet for the one practice I attended my freshman year. I wonder where it is now.

Ani wrote:Firstly, I wasnt aware that people had attempted these before, did these practices just fade out of existance?
Michael is making the score analyzer, and we're going to try and make it calculate STD etc. so we hope it helps in picking teams.
On recruiting freshman:
- There were 5-6 freshmen in Algebra II this year, none joined math club. I tried dragging one, but he was busy with soccer. The others seemed rather free, and one had even done TMSCA in middle school for Baines. He wasnt aware that Elkins had a math club until March. Furthermore, he's in Al. 2, Chem I, and CS I as a freshman, making him an ideal pick. I think that if we were more aggressive in recruiting members, it might help, considering that I believe there is a lot of untapped talent. Even if membership doesnt change drastically, all we need are 3-4 freshmen who are dedicated to pulling the club forward.

On everything else:
- We'll have to see how the practices work out...it is a sticky issue, and we'll have to see how it works out... maybe exemptions for those who show score improvement? I mean, if they practice at home, it may work out just as well.
- What happened to the old math club website? I saw a link to it on wikipedia, but it seemed really inactive and only had five posts. Did people just lose interest?
I believe someone was still checking them as of June 2008, I wanted to tell him that these were the new forums, but I didnt have an account.
- lol, I remember that little booklet for the one practice I attended my freshman year. I wonder where it is now.

Yeah, I figured you weren't, hence why I tried to fill you in a bit.

Specialized practices faded out of existence due to the highly differing amounts of interest in the various subjects. Almost no one liked calculator for some reason; science was too long to take practice tests and couldn't really be practiced in the usual manner, aside from physics and some chem problems; gen math was ... huh, I don't remember what happened to general math. Anyway, numsen was essentially the only thing people practiced, so we just went back to general practice sessions and dropped the focus idea.

The score analyzer sounds interesting. Good luck with that.

Sure, knock yourself out. Judging from past experiences though, the people who are dedicated to pulling the club forward are often the ones who seek out the club themselves. While you may be able to find someone with the enthusiasm to keep the club going, it'll definitely be a difficult search.

Meh. How to handle practice issues is entirely up to you guys. If there's time, group practice sessions outside of school might be beneficial, both for increasing scores and for building club morale. Plus, if the group sessions start early and not, say, in the few weeks before state/UIL, then it wouldn't be as much of a problem if you goofed off a bit instead of strictly practicing.

The old math club website was abandoned due to server and coding issues. If I remember right, Yidi got annoyed by the Matt's unusual "everything-on-one-line" coding style? Then Stephen continued to struggle with it. Jared tried to make it work, but I think he had some difficulty? Regardless, the server hosting the site eventually died/became exceedingly sporadic, and we ditched the thing. There really never was much on there: a handful of forum and news posts, some pictures, and an old t-shirt design.

I seem to remember us having a couple practice sign-in booklets. The most prominent one I remember, and probably the one to which you're referring, was the lime-green book Shirley made out of Mrs. Ward's test query/quibble(?) sheets. It's probably still in one of the cabinets in Mrs. Ward's room.