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A public school in Florida built America’s greatest math team

241 points by jbredeche 4y ago

wwarner 4y ago
Great article, and raises the bar for what can be achieved at a young age. But it’s about building a winning team and not so much about broadly improving math education.
QuarterReptile 4y ago
The article cites '66th in FL and outside top 1000' (from which I infer they are near 1000) as a demonstration of how ordinary they are. There are about 27k high schools in the US, and 774 FL high schools. Bucholz high school has 2254 student and is the largest in Gainesville, per Wikipedia. All that to say that the article understates the starting point for this impressive endeavor.
cs702 4y ago
Inspiring story, but the absence of statistical rigor bothers me. This little fact, in particular, begs more questions: > Many of the gifted kids in his program have parents who work at the nearby University of Florida and push to get on Mr. Frazer’s radar. Is there any data comparing how these kids perform compared to other kids whose parents also work for a top-100-ranked university? (US News ranks University of Florida as #38 nationwide.) Do these kids do better or worse than their comparable peers nationwide?
dzdt 4y ago
There was a similar example in Nebraska with Leona Penner. [1] Her classes were absolutely dominant at every state level competition. One key seems to be an intensely motivated teacher devoting their own life to this and motivating their students. Another key is school district administration willing to arrange things to let greatness happen. [1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/journalstar.com/news/local/education/east-math-teacher-retiring-course-going-with-her/article_59a4fabd-9e07-5751-8439-3c86731006c6.amp.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/journalstar.com/news/local/educ...
- jethkl 4y ago
  I was in Penner's class. Hard work, but I think it was worth it.
  - kickout 4y ago
    Unexpected Lincoln East encounter in HN…
fspeech 4y ago
While congratulations are in order for the team I don't know by what standards the writer judges them to be the "greatest". I have not heard of "Mu Alpha Theta" until reading this article. The standard (as in "most participated") math competition sequence is AMC 10/12, AIME, USA(J)MO, IMO. For teams Math Count (for middle schoolers) and ARML are also popular. The winners at these events are so exceptional it is hard to see a formula to their success other than extraordinary talents and efforts. That being said I did observe that in my son's public high school the math team members very much teach and inspire each other.
- teacherscrub18 4y ago
  Sure the WINNERS are exceptional. They would be in any competition. The great part is that just preparing (practicing) makes people stronger problem solvers. Which is not the case in typical maths schoolwork. To echo the parent, though: the school is NOT bragging about success on AMC contests. Probably because they do not have it. Similar prep with a strong group of incoming students does work to produce successful AMC and AIME results, I can attest.
  - gloryjulio 4y ago
    > Which is not the case in typical maths schoolwork. Because their 'preparations' usually suck. As someone has gone down the path many years ago (think pre 00), the problem is that many teachers didn't teach the right way to tackle the hard problem consistently. I quit the math olympic class half way in high school because I couldn't keep up with it anymore, as I was only brute forcing. I only learnt how to consistently tackle hard problems and being self introspective to maintain the high performance relatively easily many years later when I joined the workforce and being much better at learning. I feel like this kind knowledge is lost in the current schools especially under circumstances, where let the students to explore their best potentials are no longer the goal. And many ppl like me only rediscovered how to learn and work hard correctly and joyfully after adulthood through various online articles and videos.
    - mlyle 4y ago
awsrocks 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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Proven 4y ago
imgabe 4y ago
https://archive.ph/DZ65Z https://archive.ph/DZ65Z
gnicholas 4y ago
Their ability to succeed is given a boost by newfangled math frameworks like the one CA is trying to ram through (public comment be damned).
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
Fascinating article. It is interesting to see how much room there (still) is for applying basic, obvious, common-sense approaches. And of course the best part is seeing the incredible impact he's had on literally thousands of lives as a result. I did find the final bit sadly ironic. The entire point of Frazer's approach is that he looked at what the best teams were doing, came up with hypotheses about weaknesses in the approach, and experimented/iterated from there. Fittingly, now that the politicians are paying attention, their immediate instinct is to just blindly ape the structure that he's built -- rather than looking to instill the same mindset in other teachers. I suppose it's the circle of life in large, bureaucratic organizations. A decade (or a century) from now, another Frazer will come along and apply the same mindset to this structure -- and all the bureaucrats will be suitably impressed again.
- corrral 4y ago
  > Fittingly, now that the politicians are paying attention, their immediate instinct is to just blindly ape the structure that he's built Entirely typical of school reform efforts. Study or (more often) a book built around a study or two comes out, hype builds, consultants latch on, dumb-shit school admins get ahold of it (and use it as an excuse for a free trip or two to some BS conferences, for them and maybe a favored teacher or two), and then try to implement it without understanding it. They usually make two major mistakes: 1) Assuming the study's results will generalize to any school, disregarding even caveats or limitations called out in the very reference work that's the foundation of the reform. 2) Ditching parts they're uncomfortable with, failing to appreciate that implementing 80% of something may not even achieve 20% of the desired effect. They do this even when it's super fucking obvious to anyone with a bit of common sense that the parts they're ignoring are key. They're especially bad about this with discipline systems, but it also frequently happens with other kinds of programs. Then they do this again every 2-4 years. For a given kind of system (English instruction, math instruction, discipline, all kinds of things). Result: schools are constantly flailing around, with shit changing for no good reason almost every single year.
- tzs 4y ago
  I don't think that is some large bureaucratic organization thing or political thing. It's just the normal difference between R&D and production.
M3L0NM4N 4y ago
I was on the team. Ama
- gfd 4y ago
  I don't recognize the contest name although I did math contests a long time (over ten years) ago. Why aren't AMC/AIME/USAMO/IMO mentioned?
  - M3L0NM4N 4y ago
    We did take those, but the main focus of the math team is Mu Alpha Theta. I'm guessing it's a bit of a positive feedback loop of "we have the best material for MAO tests, and we place the highest in MAO competitions". Also, Frazer even writes tests for some regional MAO competitions that Buchholz competes in.
- dopeboy 4y ago
  Can you talk about your teammates / peers? What were their interests? Personality types?
- bobsmooth 4y ago
  How refreshing was it to be surrounded by people that care about learning?
  - M3L0NM4N 4y ago
    Probably one of the best things the math team has taught me after I left was to surround myself with people of the same desires, in this case, learning. I think that ideology truly paid off in spades throughout my life since then. I'd always worried about being "cool" in school, and I'd say I still try to find that work hard / play hard balance, as cliche as it sounds. The math team introduced me to people who weren't necessarily "cool", but wanted what I wanted: good grades, a good career, etc. Now, later on in my life, surrounding myself with the smartest people has made a massive positive impact on my life.
- gnicholas 4y ago
selwynii 4y ago
This is what happens when you encourage high achievement and select for it. It's not a model that's going to work everywhere. It certainly helps that he develops an accelerated program but the effect of that program versus the selection process is the most important question of all.
schemester 4y ago
They had a decent showing at the ARML. 9th place if you include the off-site teams. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RvdE4RcA99uXvlaRl4J_Y11Qo6A7Hf4-fBPtSJQUjAU/htmlview https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RvdE4RcA99uXvlaRl4J_...
- 78124781 4y ago
  If I'm reading the standings correctly, they are competing as a team from a single HS while most of the others are all-star teams composed of students from multiple different HSes in a state or area? And they finished higher than noted supermagnet TJHSST? That is impressive, even if it looks like Lexington HS (MA) finished ahead of them. Are there any other similar school-based team math competitions (I know there are lots of individual ones)?
  - schemester 4y ago
    The Harvard/MIT or “HMMT” contest has teams and team rankings, much like the ARML.
  - dmix 4y ago
    If you read the article he recruits kids when they are still in middle school, basically poaching the best students from various other schools to join his high school. So it's essentially the same as an all-star team, but putting them all together in the same class and recruiting some university-level talent to help teach them. The article tries to present it as an 'average school', but it's not an average class of kids. That said, it could definitely still help kids who wouldn't have that opportunity at their own schools.
    - M3L0NM4N 4y ago
      I mean, these are still kids in Gainesville, and about 80-90% of them come from one middle school called Lincoln, the best magnet program in Gainesville. He doesn't really "poach" kids as much as develop the willing ones with his teaching methods while in middle school so they hit the ground running when they hit high school. But the regular Lincoln kids and many other middle schools in Gainesville would feed into Buchholz high school regardless.
dmix 4y ago
Apparently Frazer doesn't have a teaching degree, he only has a bachelors in accounting. I'm curious if that played a role in his thinking.
- kevmo 4y ago
  I believe his father and father-in-law were math professors (I did a little digging, because I live in the area and did Mu Alpha Theta to little success in high school).
visarga 4y ago
Reminds me of the math education system in my country when I was a kid, but it was all about the Math Olympiad. They found the most promising kids and invited them to form a club where they got instructed above and beyond the curriculum. Kids got to know each other and form friendships, got motivated by cooperation and competition. This is all besides regular school.
- frozencell 4y ago
  Good, me too. But the rest is sadly unpriviliged.
nopinsight 4y ago
I used to teach competitive math problems. An observation: These math challenges resemble real-world problems much more than routine textbook stuff. You need to apply knowledge from disparate areas, combine them creatively, prod it and often fail several times before you get it right. It's a good way to prepare one's kids (or oneself) to solve hard problems in real life. I’d also argue such problems ought to be part of the curriculum for “normal” kids too. They might just more time and hints along the way than gifted kids. Once they get the taste of solving interesting problems from a young age, they might enjoy math more as well. Note how many kids are attracted to games—-some of which are objectively more challenging than routine school math problems.
- cyber_kinetist 4y ago
  Seeing by myself how the Korean kids hack out gold medals in international math/physics olympiads by drilling the hell out in cram schools (and then most of them going to medical school with these credentials anyway), I really don’t have a good impression for these contests. Often the problems seem incredibly contrived and its connection to the real world (or at least higher-level academia) seems dubious. These contests might seem to test creativity in a superficial glance, but these cram schools have a database of past/potential problems in their “problem bank” and once high schoolers grind away thousands of these questions for a long period of time they can solve these like robots. (Obviously you still need to be smart enough to do this, but I really don’t believe it is a good nurturer of creativity.) I’ve seen lots of friends passionate and skilled in math and science but either fail to do well in these contests, or don’t give a single fuck about it due to the problems I’ve described.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  Have you got resources to recommend? That's exactly the kind of thing I want for my kids, but apart from a blob of questions from my old math teacher, I don't have any.
  - a99wang 4y ago
    Aside from the Art of Problem Solving books mentioned by others, you may find https://web.evanchen.cc/faq-contest.html https://web.evanchen.cc/faq-contest.html worth reading. I learnt a lot about math (contests (strategy, experience), undergraduate material, etc.) and more by deep-diving into Evan's site.
lordnacho 4y ago
I do an occasional pilgrimage to my old high school math teacher. He's in his 80s now, but in his last year before retiring, we won a math contest for European International schools. He was very happy about that. The guy still gets visits from people in their 60s that he taught decades before me. He really made the subject come to life, had a sense of humor, and was generally a good guy. He also ran the school math teams. Several kids in the years above me did quite well on those, all down to him giving us accelerated content and questions that were "actually interesting" rather than dozens of the same thing over and over. Of course it varies what that means depending on where you are in your journey, but at each step there tends to be an aha! moment where things come together. I caught up with him a few weeks ago, and he told me he actually didn't enjoy the university level of mathematics. Somehow things got very dry and boring, and that's part of why he ended up teaching high school.
mplewis9z 4y ago
I went to Eastside High School (also in Gainesville, FL, and bitter rivals) and was on the MAO team there. It was always so satisfying when you managed to beat the Buchholz team at competitions (even if it was their underclassmen), just because they were so dominant even a decade ago. Weird to see Frazer still kicking, all the Eastside math teachers seem to move on pretty quickly.
poorbutdebtfree 4y ago
Impressive considering the demographics of Gainsville. They used standardized test scores to identify talented grade school kids and put them all in the same room. Can we still do that in diverse school districts in CA and MA? I think we'd have a major uproar.
- dilap 4y ago
  correct -- see e.g. what just happened to lowell in san francisco edit: but reversed! so maybe you could...
  - raunak 4y ago
    You're right, but they also reversed it just recently
    - dilap 4y ago
      ah my SF news is out of date (moved out about a year ago, tho i've still got family there) -- that's great to hear!
    - selimthegrim 4y ago
      Source?
      - raunak 4y ago
        https://sfstandard.com/education/selective-admissions-are-back-at-lowell-high-after-a-split-vote-reinstates-the-controversial-policy/ https://sfstandard.com/education/selective-admissions-are-ba...
- jdkee 4y ago
  And look at the per pupil spending compared to the national average. About half. See https://www.schooldigger.com/go/FL/schools/0003000029/school.aspx#:~:text=Compare%20F.%20W.%20Buchholz%20High%20School%20employs%2083.8%20full%2Dtime%20teachers,Buchholz%20High%20School%20is%20%247%2C330 https://www.schooldigger.com/go/FL/schools/0003000029/school.... See also https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66
rscho 4y ago
Funnily, on the other side of the pond we would find the same title about a private school more surprising.
onphonenow 4y ago
Interesting - someone laser focused on education. When school went virtual he quit as a teacher, rented a space, and told 145 students he’d be teaching there. 140 showed up and they crushed competitors. So he immediately felt virtual learning would not be as good as in person, school wouldn’t let him teach in person (he is in his 60s) so he quits. I’d trust this guy more then the Ed unions saying virtual is just as good as in person
- gautamdivgi 4y ago
  I don’t think virtual is anywhere as good as in person. I didn’t believe Ed unions when they said that. Anyone who has done virtual classes or conferences knows this (which is a LOT of folks at this point should know if you’ve ever done any learning online). Given that it may have been a reasonable option until covid was better manageable. I think some districts went too far. My school district thankfully was one where they did a hybrid in-person/remote. Parents could choose for the 2020-2021 school year. It was all in-person (no remote) 2021-2022.
  - raarts 4y ago
    College teacher CS here. You are right. Virtual teaching sucks. But that's not the whole story. Remote teaching can work for highly motivated people with lots of discipline. And the younger they get, the less often they'll have these characteristics. So in my opinion, never teach children remotely. Or students. Adults? Depends.
- dkonofalski 4y ago
  I think virtual learning could be at least as good as in-person for a lot of subjects but the world, and the US especially, didn't prepare anyone for it and didn't provide any resources to do it during the pandemic so I'm not surprised that the outcomes were terrible. They basically needed teachers who had never even done remote learning before to pivot on a dime, with no additional money, training, or resources, and then teach kids who had also never done the same and with no resources or training. We, in the US, did nothing to try and prepare people for a situation like that. On top of that, you have a whole segment of parents who don't care about whether or not kids were actually learning but just whether or not schools were open. The number of stats that I've seen that compare days that schools were opened (especially in red states compared to blue states) is horrifying. If the metric we're using to determine whether education was successful is whether the doors were open, then we're focusing on the wrong things. On top of that, they act like the schools open in person had better outcomes simply because they were in-person while ignoring the lack of preparation and any other factors. The whole state of education in the US is sad.
bdastous 4y ago
“It turned out there was value in putting a bunch of smart kids in the same room: They feel empowered to make each other smarter.” It’s too bad this is no longer in fashion with the educational establishment.
- fuzzfactor 4y ago
  This is also an important step not to skip: >the pipeline for the high school’s math team must begin long before students reach high school, so Mr. Frazer searches for prospects in elementary school and steers them to accelerated math classes in middle school. >“You wouldn’t grab a kid in ninth grade who’s never played football and expect him to be a great high-school football player,” he said. “For most of these kids, this is their football.”
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ken47 4y ago
This sounds fun. I wish I had access to teachers/mentors like this in high school instead of teachers who simply wanted to maximize the average score on AP Calc exams; for those in Europe, it's quite easy to get maximum marks on AP Calc 1 and 2 if you are competent at math. You certainly don't need to be gifted. I can understand why many teachers try to give disproportionate assistance to students who are disinterested in or untalented at math, but a lot of these kinds of students are just taking the harder math class to pad their university applications. If a student is on the border, a committed teacher can get them into maximum-mark territory. But the odds of such students building on these learnings throughout their lives is probably very low. In other words, it seems like a poor investment of time. And university rankings are obnoxious enough, but my goodness - this article invokes high school ranking? We live in a world where people want to rank everything and live with the false certainty of a nonsensical hierarchy. Well, I suppose that describes humankind for at least the past few millennia, so never mind. Back to work I go...
- zozbot234 4y ago
  > In other words, it seems like a bad investment of time. It's only a bad investment of time because of ineffective teaching methods. What these students need is rigorous yet effective instruction that doesn't simply expect them to "learn all the math by themselves" and actively helps them master the subject, in a step by step fashion. Unfortunately, this is very unpopular with current teachers because it's seen as "demeaning" the profession.
cmroanirgo 4y ago
This story reminds me of the man behind the movie "Stand and Deliver" (1988), Jaime Escalante, who in the 80's made his school famous for generating students that passed the Advanced Placement Calculus exams. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante 1982 - 18 students passed, but by 1991 "the number of Garfield students taking advanced placement examinations in math and other subjects jumped to 570". I like it when teachers teach far and beyond the boring old curriculum and inspire kids far beyond what they thought capable of themselves.
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  The union and administrators must have really hated his guts. The union is easily explained; he made other teachers and schools look bad. I wonder why the administrators didn’t want the students succeeding though. > In his final years at Garfield, Escalante received threats and hate mail.[14] By 1990, he had lost the math department chairmanship. Escalante's math enrichment program had grown to more than 400 students. His class sizes had increased to over 50 students in some cases. That was far beyond the 35 student limit set by the teachers' union, which increased its criticism of Escalante's work.[14] In 1991, the number of Garfield students taking advanced placement examinations in math and other subjects jumped to 570. The same year, citing faculty politics and petty jealousies, Escalante and Jiménez left Garfield.[14] Escalante found new employment at Hiram W. Johnson High School in Sacramento, California. At the height of Escalante's success, Garfield graduates were entering the University of Southern California in such great numbers that they outnumbered all the other high schools in the working-class East Los Angeles region combined.[15] Even students who failed the AP exam often went on to study at California State University, Los Angeles.[14] > Angelo Villavicencio, one of Escalante's handpicked instructors, took over the program after Escalante's departure, teaching the remaining 107 AP students in two classes over the following year. Sixty-seven of Villavicencio's students went on to take the AP exam and forty-seven passed. The math program's decline at Garfield became apparent following the departure of Escalante, Villavicencio, and other teachers associated with its inception and development. In just a few years, the number of AP calculus students at Garfield who passed their exams dropped by more than 80%. In 1996, Villavicencio contacted Garfield's new principal, Tony Garcia, and offered to come back to help revive the dying calculus program. His offer was rejected.[14] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante
mod 4y ago
Seems like we should be studying people like this teacher. They've cracked a code but we act like it's individual excellence that can't be transferred.
- SiempreViernes 4y ago
  I mean, the article explicitly talks about how they start by collecting pre-exiting individual excellence, there is never any pretence of this program creating excellence from average students.
  - sdfhdhjdw3 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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TYPE_FASTER 4y ago
A teacher at a public school in Florida built the team. I was really lucky to have a high school math teacher that made calculus interesting enough for me to want to learn it. I'm not sure I would have made it through the Comp Sci program at college without it, as we were required to take an advanced math class every semester, and having an understanding of calculus was critical to both getting through those math classes, as well as the physics classes that were also required for the degree. Related (content around teaching is part way through the article): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/12/15/most-likely-to-succeed-malcolm-gladwell https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/12/15/most-likely-to...
ramesh31 4y ago
There's definitely nothing telling about public education in a city with 20% black and 50% hispanic population being completely unrepresented on a team of dozens of kids. I'm sure that the "identifying talent" that's happening here is completely equitable and inclusive. I'm sure all the brown kids sitting in overcrowded classes are having a great time watching the white and asian kids go off to their special treatment with dedicated tutoring. This is exactly how our system of class based privilege perpetuates itself.
- beams_of_light 4y ago
  I have two kids. One of them was an "honor" student from 6th grade on. The difference was one teacher. My younger one was tapped by their teacher for a special program in 5th grade that put her in a class with other "smart" kids for a day each week in 6th grade. From there, those kids blossomed to honors classes later. For my other kid, the distractions in classrooms full of kids who didn't care about learning proved to be too much at times. The honor student had to occasionally take classes with "normal" students, and found the environment very distracting. It matters how much the kids in the class want to learn, as opposed to make fun of each other and the teacher, or be disruptive in other ways. The older one still did fine, has a degree and a job, but it was a struggle. So, I get your point. I have strongly felt for a long time now that even average students should have received the experience my honor student did in 6th grade. It was a great break from the average day of going from class to class, broke up the monotony of standard curriculum, and provided those kids with a good foundation for thinking out of the box and learning to learn in a focused environment. It provided a clear pathway through honors curriculum in classrooms full of students and teachers who cared. I want that for every kid, but with Republicans doing their damnedest destroy public education and the impact it's having on teachers' mental well-being (for those who can even be bothered to become teachers anymore, given the low pay and guaranteed bullshit from not just students but parents and the government itself), it's hard to imagine it becoming a reality in the short term.
  - BeFlatXIII 4y ago
    > The honor student had to occasionally take classes with "normal" students, and found the environment very distracting. I was consistently the teacher's pet in my English classes because I chose those to be my "normal" classes in high school because I thought they were boring. Even without putting in much effort, being quiet and actually able to answer the questions endeared me to my teachers.

241 points by jbredeche 4y ago

Great article, and raises the bar for what can be achieved at a young age. But it’s about building a winning team and not so much about broadly improving math education.

QuarterReptile 4y ago

The article cites '66th in FL and outside top 1000' (from which I infer they are near 1000) as a demonstration of how ordinary they are. There are about 27k high schools in the US, and 774 FL high schools. Bucholz high school has 2254 student and is the largest in Gainesville, per Wikipedia. All that to say that the article understates the starting point for this impressive endeavor.

cs702 4y ago

Inspiring story, but the absence of statistical rigor bothers me. This little fact, in particular, begs more questions: > Many of the gifted kids in his program have parents who work at the nearby University of Florida and push to get on Mr. Frazer’s radar. Is there any data comparing how these kids perform compared to other kids whose parents also work for a top-100-ranked university? (US News ranks University of Florida as #38 nationwide.) Do these kids do better or worse than their comparable peers nationwide?

dzdt 4y ago

There was a similar example in Nebraska with Leona Penner. [1] Her classes were absolutely dominant at every state level competition. One key seems to be an intensely motivated teacher devoting their own life to this and motivating their students. Another key is school district administration willing to arrange things to let greatness happen. [1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/journalstar.com/news/local/education/east-math-teacher-retiring-course-going-with-her/article_59a4fabd-9e07-5751-8439-3c86731006c6.amp.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/journalstar.com/news/local/educ...

jethkl 4y ago
I was in Penner's class. Hard work, but I think it was worth it.
- kickout 4y ago
  Unexpected Lincoln East encounter in HN…

fspeech 4y ago

While congratulations are in order for the team I don't know by what standards the writer judges them to be the "greatest". I have not heard of "Mu Alpha Theta" until reading this article. The standard (as in "most participated") math competition sequence is AMC 10/12, AIME, USA(J)MO, IMO. For teams Math Count (for middle schoolers) and ARML are also popular. The winners at these events are so exceptional it is hard to see a formula to their success other than extraordinary talents and efforts. That being said I did observe that in my son's public high school the math team members very much teach and inspire each other.

teacherscrub18 4y ago
Sure the WINNERS are exceptional. They would be in any competition. The great part is that just preparing (practicing) makes people stronger problem solvers. Which is not the case in typical maths schoolwork. To echo the parent, though: the school is NOT bragging about success on AMC contests. Probably because they do not have it. Similar prep with a strong group of incoming students does work to produce successful AMC and AIME results, I can attest.
- gloryjulio 4y ago
  > Which is not the case in typical maths schoolwork. Because their 'preparations' usually suck. As someone has gone down the path many years ago (think pre 00), the problem is that many teachers didn't teach the right way to tackle the hard problem consistently. I quit the math olympic class half way in high school because I couldn't keep up with it anymore, as I was only brute forcing. I only learnt how to consistently tackle hard problems and being self introspective to maintain the high performance relatively easily many years later when I joined the workforce and being much better at learning. I feel like this kind knowledge is lost in the current schools especially under circumstances, where let the students to explore their best potentials are no longer the goal. And many ppl like me only rediscovered how to learn and work hard correctly and joyfully after adulthood through various online articles and videos.
  - mlyle 4y ago

awsrocks 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Proven 4y ago

imgabe 4y ago

https://archive.ph/DZ65Z https://archive.ph/DZ65Z

gnicholas 4y ago

Their ability to succeed is given a boost by newfangled math frameworks like the one CA is trying to ram through (public comment be damned).

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago

Fascinating article. It is interesting to see how much room there (still) is for applying basic, obvious, common-sense approaches. And of course the best part is seeing the incredible impact he's had on literally thousands of lives as a result. I did find the final bit sadly ironic. The entire point of Frazer's approach is that he looked at what the best teams were doing, came up with hypotheses about weaknesses in the approach, and experimented/iterated from there. Fittingly, now that the politicians are paying attention, their immediate instinct is to just blindly ape the structure that he's built -- rather than looking to instill the same mindset in other teachers. I suppose it's the circle of life in large, bureaucratic organizations. A decade (or a century) from now, another Frazer will come along and apply the same mindset to this structure -- and all the bureaucrats will be suitably impressed again.

corrral 4y ago
> Fittingly, now that the politicians are paying attention, their immediate instinct is to just blindly ape the structure that he's built Entirely typical of school reform efforts. Study or (more often) a book built around a study or two comes out, hype builds, consultants latch on, dumb-shit school admins get ahold of it (and use it as an excuse for a free trip or two to some BS conferences, for them and maybe a favored teacher or two), and then try to implement it without understanding it. They usually make two major mistakes: 1) Assuming the study's results will generalize to any school, disregarding even caveats or limitations called out in the very reference work that's the foundation of the reform. 2) Ditching parts they're uncomfortable with, failing to appreciate that implementing 80% of something may not even achieve 20% of the desired effect. They do this even when it's super fucking obvious to anyone with a bit of common sense that the parts they're ignoring are key. They're especially bad about this with discipline systems, but it also frequently happens with other kinds of programs. Then they do this again every 2-4 years. For a given kind of system (English instruction, math instruction, discipline, all kinds of things). Result: schools are constantly flailing around, with shit changing for no good reason almost every single year.
tzs 4y ago
I don't think that is some large bureaucratic organization thing or political thing. It's just the normal difference between R&D and production.

M3L0NM4N 4y ago

I was on the team. Ama

gfd 4y ago
I don't recognize the contest name although I did math contests a long time (over ten years) ago. Why aren't AMC/AIME/USAMO/IMO mentioned?
- M3L0NM4N 4y ago
  We did take those, but the main focus of the math team is Mu Alpha Theta. I'm guessing it's a bit of a positive feedback loop of "we have the best material for MAO tests, and we place the highest in MAO competitions". Also, Frazer even writes tests for some regional MAO competitions that Buchholz competes in.
dopeboy 4y ago
Can you talk about your teammates / peers? What were their interests? Personality types?
bobsmooth 4y ago
How refreshing was it to be surrounded by people that care about learning?
- M3L0NM4N 4y ago
  Probably one of the best things the math team has taught me after I left was to surround myself with people of the same desires, in this case, learning. I think that ideology truly paid off in spades throughout my life since then. I'd always worried about being "cool" in school, and I'd say I still try to find that work hard / play hard balance, as cliche as it sounds. The math team introduced me to people who weren't necessarily "cool", but wanted what I wanted: good grades, a good career, etc. Now, later on in my life, surrounding myself with the smartest people has made a massive positive impact on my life.
gnicholas 4y ago

selwynii 4y ago

This is what happens when you encourage high achievement and select for it. It's not a model that's going to work everywhere. It certainly helps that he develops an accelerated program but the effect of that program versus the selection process is the most important question of all.

schemester 4y ago

They had a decent showing at the ARML. 9th place if you include the off-site teams. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RvdE4RcA99uXvlaRl4J_Y11Qo6A7Hf4-fBPtSJQUjAU/htmlview https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RvdE4RcA99uXvlaRl4J_...

78124781 4y ago
If I'm reading the standings correctly, they are competing as a team from a single HS while most of the others are all-star teams composed of students from multiple different HSes in a state or area? And they finished higher than noted supermagnet TJHSST? That is impressive, even if it looks like Lexington HS (MA) finished ahead of them. Are there any other similar school-based team math competitions (I know there are lots of individual ones)?
- schemester 4y ago
  The Harvard/MIT or “HMMT” contest has teams and team rankings, much like the ARML.
- dmix 4y ago
  If you read the article he recruits kids when they are still in middle school, basically poaching the best students from various other schools to join his high school. So it's essentially the same as an all-star team, but putting them all together in the same class and recruiting some university-level talent to help teach them. The article tries to present it as an 'average school', but it's not an average class of kids. That said, it could definitely still help kids who wouldn't have that opportunity at their own schools.
  - M3L0NM4N 4y ago
    I mean, these are still kids in Gainesville, and about 80-90% of them come from one middle school called Lincoln, the best magnet program in Gainesville. He doesn't really "poach" kids as much as develop the willing ones with his teaching methods while in middle school so they hit the ground running when they hit high school. But the regular Lincoln kids and many other middle schools in Gainesville would feed into Buchholz high school regardless.

dmix 4y ago

Apparently Frazer doesn't have a teaching degree, he only has a bachelors in accounting. I'm curious if that played a role in his thinking.

kevmo 4y ago
I believe his father and father-in-law were math professors (I did a little digging, because I live in the area and did Mu Alpha Theta to little success in high school).

visarga 4y ago

Reminds me of the math education system in my country when I was a kid, but it was all about the Math Olympiad. They found the most promising kids and invited them to form a club where they got instructed above and beyond the curriculum. Kids got to know each other and form friendships, got motivated by cooperation and competition. This is all besides regular school.

frozencell 4y ago
Good, me too. But the rest is sadly unpriviliged.

nopinsight 4y ago

I used to teach competitive math problems. An observation: These math challenges resemble real-world problems much more than routine textbook stuff. You need to apply knowledge from disparate areas, combine them creatively, prod it and often fail several times before you get it right. It's a good way to prepare one's kids (or oneself) to solve hard problems in real life. I’d also argue such problems ought to be part of the curriculum for “normal” kids too. They might just more time and hints along the way than gifted kids. Once they get the taste of solving interesting problems from a young age, they might enjoy math more as well. Note how many kids are attracted to games—-some of which are objectively more challenging than routine school math problems.

cyber_kinetist 4y ago
Seeing by myself how the Korean kids hack out gold medals in international math/physics olympiads by drilling the hell out in cram schools (and then most of them going to medical school with these credentials anyway), I really don’t have a good impression for these contests. Often the problems seem incredibly contrived and its connection to the real world (or at least higher-level academia) seems dubious. These contests might seem to test creativity in a superficial glance, but these cram schools have a database of past/potential problems in their “problem bank” and once high schoolers grind away thousands of these questions for a long period of time they can solve these like robots. (Obviously you still need to be smart enough to do this, but I really don’t believe it is a good nurturer of creativity.) I’ve seen lots of friends passionate and skilled in math and science but either fail to do well in these contests, or don’t give a single fuck about it due to the problems I’ve described.
lordnacho 4y ago
Have you got resources to recommend? That's exactly the kind of thing I want for my kids, but apart from a blob of questions from my old math teacher, I don't have any.
- a99wang 4y ago
  Aside from the Art of Problem Solving books mentioned by others, you may find https://web.evanchen.cc/faq-contest.html https://web.evanchen.cc/faq-contest.html worth reading. I learnt a lot about math (contests (strategy, experience), undergraduate material, etc.) and more by deep-diving into Evan's site.

lordnacho 4y ago

I do an occasional pilgrimage to my old high school math teacher. He's in his 80s now, but in his last year before retiring, we won a math contest for European International schools. He was very happy about that. The guy still gets visits from people in their 60s that he taught decades before me. He really made the subject come to life, had a sense of humor, and was generally a good guy. He also ran the school math teams. Several kids in the years above me did quite well on those, all down to him giving us accelerated content and questions that were "actually interesting" rather than dozens of the same thing over and over. Of course it varies what that means depending on where you are in your journey, but at each step there tends to be an aha! moment where things come together. I caught up with him a few weeks ago, and he told me he actually didn't enjoy the university level of mathematics. Somehow things got very dry and boring, and that's part of why he ended up teaching high school.

mplewis9z 4y ago

I went to Eastside High School (also in Gainesville, FL, and bitter rivals) and was on the MAO team there. It was always so satisfying when you managed to beat the Buchholz team at competitions (even if it was their underclassmen), just because they were so dominant even a decade ago. Weird to see Frazer still kicking, all the Eastside math teachers seem to move on pretty quickly.

poorbutdebtfree 4y ago

Impressive considering the demographics of Gainsville. They used standardized test scores to identify talented grade school kids and put them all in the same room. Can we still do that in diverse school districts in CA and MA? I think we'd have a major uproar.

dilap 4y ago
correct -- see e.g. what just happened to lowell in san francisco edit: but reversed! so maybe you could...
- raunak 4y ago
  You're right, but they also reversed it just recently
  - dilap 4y ago
    ah my SF news is out of date (moved out about a year ago, tho i've still got family there) -- that's great to hear!
  - selimthegrim 4y ago
    Source?
    - raunak 4y ago
      https://sfstandard.com/education/selective-admissions-are-back-at-lowell-high-after-a-split-vote-reinstates-the-controversial-policy/ https://sfstandard.com/education/selective-admissions-are-ba...
jdkee 4y ago
And look at the per pupil spending compared to the national average. About half. See https://www.schooldigger.com/go/FL/schools/0003000029/school.aspx#:~:text=Compare%20F.%20W.%20Buchholz%20High%20School%20employs%2083.8%20full%2Dtime%20teachers,Buchholz%20High%20School%20is%20%247%2C330 https://www.schooldigger.com/go/FL/schools/0003000029/school.... See also https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66

rscho 4y ago

Funnily, on the other side of the pond we would find the same title about a private school more surprising.

onphonenow 4y ago

Interesting - someone laser focused on education. When school went virtual he quit as a teacher, rented a space, and told 145 students he’d be teaching there. 140 showed up and they crushed competitors. So he immediately felt virtual learning would not be as good as in person, school wouldn’t let him teach in person (he is in his 60s) so he quits. I’d trust this guy more then the Ed unions saying virtual is just as good as in person

gautamdivgi 4y ago
I don’t think virtual is anywhere as good as in person. I didn’t believe Ed unions when they said that. Anyone who has done virtual classes or conferences knows this (which is a LOT of folks at this point should know if you’ve ever done any learning online). Given that it may have been a reasonable option until covid was better manageable. I think some districts went too far. My school district thankfully was one where they did a hybrid in-person/remote. Parents could choose for the 2020-2021 school year. It was all in-person (no remote) 2021-2022.
- raarts 4y ago
  College teacher CS here. You are right. Virtual teaching sucks. But that's not the whole story. Remote teaching can work for highly motivated people with lots of discipline. And the younger they get, the less often they'll have these characteristics. So in my opinion, never teach children remotely. Or students. Adults? Depends.
dkonofalski 4y ago
I think virtual learning could be at least as good as in-person for a lot of subjects but the world, and the US especially, didn't prepare anyone for it and didn't provide any resources to do it during the pandemic so I'm not surprised that the outcomes were terrible. They basically needed teachers who had never even done remote learning before to pivot on a dime, with no additional money, training, or resources, and then teach kids who had also never done the same and with no resources or training. We, in the US, did nothing to try and prepare people for a situation like that. On top of that, you have a whole segment of parents who don't care about whether or not kids were actually learning but just whether or not schools were open. The number of stats that I've seen that compare days that schools were opened (especially in red states compared to blue states) is horrifying. If the metric we're using to determine whether education was successful is whether the doors were open, then we're focusing on the wrong things. On top of that, they act like the schools open in person had better outcomes simply because they were in-person while ignoring the lack of preparation and any other factors. The whole state of education in the US is sad.

bdastous 4y ago

“It turned out there was value in putting a bunch of smart kids in the same room: They feel empowered to make each other smarter.” It’s too bad this is no longer in fashion with the educational establishment.

fuzzfactor 4y ago
This is also an important step not to skip: >the pipeline for the high school’s math team must begin long before students reach high school, so Mr. Frazer searches for prospects in elementary school and steers them to accelerated math classes in middle school. >“You wouldn’t grab a kid in ninth grade who’s never played football and expect him to be a great high-school football player,” he said. “For most of these kids, this is their football.”
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ken47 4y ago

This sounds fun. I wish I had access to teachers/mentors like this in high school instead of teachers who simply wanted to maximize the average score on AP Calc exams; for those in Europe, it's quite easy to get maximum marks on AP Calc 1 and 2 if you are competent at math. You certainly don't need to be gifted. I can understand why many teachers try to give disproportionate assistance to students who are disinterested in or untalented at math, but a lot of these kinds of students are just taking the harder math class to pad their university applications. If a student is on the border, a committed teacher can get them into maximum-mark territory. But the odds of such students building on these learnings throughout their lives is probably very low. In other words, it seems like a poor investment of time. And university rankings are obnoxious enough, but my goodness - this article invokes high school ranking? We live in a world where people want to rank everything and live with the false certainty of a nonsensical hierarchy. Well, I suppose that describes humankind for at least the past few millennia, so never mind. Back to work I go...

zozbot234 4y ago
> In other words, it seems like a bad investment of time. It's only a bad investment of time because of ineffective teaching methods. What these students need is rigorous yet effective instruction that doesn't simply expect them to "learn all the math by themselves" and actively helps them master the subject, in a step by step fashion. Unfortunately, this is very unpopular with current teachers because it's seen as "demeaning" the profession.

cmroanirgo 4y ago

This story reminds me of the man behind the movie "Stand and Deliver" (1988), Jaime Escalante, who in the 80's made his school famous for generating students that passed the Advanced Placement Calculus exams. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante 1982 - 18 students passed, but by 1991 "the number of Garfield students taking advanced placement examinations in math and other subjects jumped to 570". I like it when teachers teach far and beyond the boring old curriculum and inspire kids far beyond what they thought capable of themselves.

barry-cotter 4y ago
The union and administrators must have really hated his guts. The union is easily explained; he made other teachers and schools look bad. I wonder why the administrators didn’t want the students succeeding though. > In his final years at Garfield, Escalante received threats and hate mail.[14] By 1990, he had lost the math department chairmanship. Escalante's math enrichment program had grown to more than 400 students. His class sizes had increased to over 50 students in some cases. That was far beyond the 35 student limit set by the teachers' union, which increased its criticism of Escalante's work.[14] In 1991, the number of Garfield students taking advanced placement examinations in math and other subjects jumped to 570. The same year, citing faculty politics and petty jealousies, Escalante and Jiménez left Garfield.[14] Escalante found new employment at Hiram W. Johnson High School in Sacramento, California. At the height of Escalante's success, Garfield graduates were entering the University of Southern California in such great numbers that they outnumbered all the other high schools in the working-class East Los Angeles region combined.[15] Even students who failed the AP exam often went on to study at California State University, Los Angeles.[14] > Angelo Villavicencio, one of Escalante's handpicked instructors, took over the program after Escalante's departure, teaching the remaining 107 AP students in two classes over the following year. Sixty-seven of Villavicencio's students went on to take the AP exam and forty-seven passed. The math program's decline at Garfield became apparent following the departure of Escalante, Villavicencio, and other teachers associated with its inception and development. In just a few years, the number of AP calculus students at Garfield who passed their exams dropped by more than 80%. In 1996, Villavicencio contacted Garfield's new principal, Tony Garcia, and offered to come back to help revive the dying calculus program. His offer was rejected.[14] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante

mod 4y ago

Seems like we should be studying people like this teacher. They've cracked a code but we act like it's individual excellence that can't be transferred.

SiempreViernes 4y ago
I mean, the article explicitly talks about how they start by collecting pre-exiting individual excellence, there is never any pretence of this program creating excellence from average students.
- sdfhdhjdw3 4y ago

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TYPE_FASTER 4y ago

A teacher at a public school in Florida built the team. I was really lucky to have a high school math teacher that made calculus interesting enough for me to want to learn it. I'm not sure I would have made it through the Comp Sci program at college without it, as we were required to take an advanced math class every semester, and having an understanding of calculus was critical to both getting through those math classes, as well as the physics classes that were also required for the degree. Related (content around teaching is part way through the article): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/12/15/most-likely-to-succeed-malcolm-gladwell https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/12/15/most-likely-to...

ramesh31 4y ago

There's definitely nothing telling about public education in a city with 20% black and 50% hispanic population being completely unrepresented on a team of dozens of kids. I'm sure that the "identifying talent" that's happening here is completely equitable and inclusive. I'm sure all the brown kids sitting in overcrowded classes are having a great time watching the white and asian kids go off to their special treatment with dedicated tutoring. This is exactly how our system of class based privilege perpetuates itself.

beams_of_light 4y ago
I have two kids. One of them was an "honor" student from 6th grade on. The difference was one teacher. My younger one was tapped by their teacher for a special program in 5th grade that put her in a class with other "smart" kids for a day each week in 6th grade. From there, those kids blossomed to honors classes later. For my other kid, the distractions in classrooms full of kids who didn't care about learning proved to be too much at times. The honor student had to occasionally take classes with "normal" students, and found the environment very distracting. It matters how much the kids in the class want to learn, as opposed to make fun of each other and the teacher, or be disruptive in other ways. The older one still did fine, has a degree and a job, but it was a struggle. So, I get your point. I have strongly felt for a long time now that even average students should have received the experience my honor student did in 6th grade. It was a great break from the average day of going from class to class, broke up the monotony of standard curriculum, and provided those kids with a good foundation for thinking out of the box and learning to learn in a focused environment. It provided a clear pathway through honors curriculum in classrooms full of students and teachers who cared. I want that for every kid, but with Republicans doing their damnedest destroy public education and the impact it's having on teachers' mental well-being (for those who can even be bothered to become teachers anymore, given the low pay and guaranteed bullshit from not just students but parents and the government itself), it's hard to imagine it becoming a reality in the short term.
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  > The honor student had to occasionally take classes with "normal" students, and found the environment very distracting. I was consistently the teacher's pet in my English classes because I chose those to be my "normal" classes in high school because I thought they were boring. Even without putting in much effort, being quiet and actually able to answer the questions endeared me to my teachers.