In ninth grade, I won first place in the statewide West Virginia State Math Field Day. What does that mean? Let’s rewind a few decades…
DIFFERENT ERA
There were differences when I was growing up decades ago (in West Virginia) compared to modern life (in California).
Back then, there was less sensitivity in measuring children’s intelligence (against each other), and then sharing those results. For example, it was common at my West Virginia school to arrange seats in the classroom by overall grade: smarter kids sat together at the front of the room. I believe that the school thought that doing this would make kids try harder academically so they could sit up front and be acknowledged as smart.
Also, it was common to post (on the wall) standardized test scores, etc (usually, the names were masked). Even if the names were hidden, you could see all scores, find yours, and know whether you were dumb or smart compared to your classmates.
Maybe West Virginia was extra backward, or more likely it was the era – but the schools doing all this didn’t see how being labeled ‘dumb’ might impact a person for life (hey dummy, sit in the back of the classroom). Plus, sitting in the back of the classroom gives you more opportunity to misbehave…
The overall point being: in the era I grew up in, there were lots of academic competitions at various levels – with the results widely shared – because no one saw the downside to low performers learning they weren’t that smart.
Also, just to counter a thought that you may be forming about how bad the West Virginia school system was – I have two arguments refuting this:
- First, when I was young, an academic group from Japan visited my school system in West Virginia to understand and adopt our best practices – because my WV school system must have had a reputation for being quite good.
- Second, when I moved from West Virginia to Illinois (10th grade to 11th grade) my grades significantly improved. In 10th grade in West Virginia, I got maybe 75% A’s, plus B’s and C’s. In high school in Illinois, I got straight A’s quite easily. Maybe I matured some, but it seemed much easier to get good grades in Illinois.
So I think it was the era, and not West Virginia or its school system.
MATH SKILLS – WEST VIRGINIA
I’ve always been naturally good at math. Not that I’m necessarily bad at other things, but it took me longer to get my non-math skills in order. Some evidence:
- I found some grade school report cards, plus some notices sent home from my school to my parents, that show that I was behaviorally/academically challenged (or they thought I was). Some of the notices called out my behavior, plus my poor record of showing up without completed homework.
- My old report cards were interesting because I got high scores (90%+) in most everything – except spelling, which was in the 60% range. 😞
- My spelling continued (continues?) to be challenged. I’ve noticed this as I digitize some old writings (even some from college) which have multiple misspellings. (This was pre spell check.)
One other piece evidence of my academic unevenness: I got sent (along with other solid students) to a test location to take a West Virginia history test – where you echo facts about WV history, get a passing grade, and are then labeled a ‘Knight of the Golden Horseshoe’ (a term from WV history). I didn’t pass.
MATH SKILLS – ILLINOIS
In high school in Illinois, I was a (large) notch above everyone in math. There was an annual standardized state math test that we would all take, and the school would post the scores on the wall. At the top would be my score, then a big gap, then everyone else’s scores. The related high school weirdness (and I think my wife still chuckles at this) is that I ‘lettered in math’. I have a physical cloth letter with the word ‘math’ on it. Sports students normally sew their letters onto their high school jackets (I didn’t).
Also, in late high school in Illinois, I took a standardized test to qualify as a ‘merit scholar’ which indicates you are smart overall, and puts you on the path to financial help and scholarships for college. My brothers Dan and Rick made the cut – I didn’t, but was very close. 🙁
BUT, back to the Math Field Day…
WEST VIRGINIA MATH FIELD DAY
This was a tiered competition, where you had to win each competition level to advance to the next. Meaning: you had to be in the top three in your school to compete at the county level. Then you had to be in the top three in the county to compete at the region level (a ‘region’ was a group of neighboring counties). Then you had to be in the top three in your region, to compete at the state level. I was in the top three at all these levels – actually first in all levels, except one – I was third in region (I think). Being third at one competition level ‘woke me up’, and made me realize I needed to get focused and try harder to do well.
The state-level competition was many hours away at a college campus, so we participants overnighted. This might have been the first time I traveled alone without my family – my math teacher drove me there. I hung out with a bunch of similar math-headed dorks like me. It was fun. One of the guys had the alphabetical list of all 55 West Virginia counties memorized: Barbour, Berkeley, Boone, Braxton, Brooke, Cabell, Calhoun, Clay, Doddridge,… I still have this list in my head.
The competition itself was a wide variety of math-related items – anything from written math problems, to physical math challenges: See that long piece of string randomly dropped on the ground? Don’t touch it, but estimate how long it is. Essentially, it wasn’t just a measure of who is best at paper math calculations (for example), it was more – who has the best overall ‘math head’?
There was one physical estimation problem that I still think about to this day (because I was a dork, and didn’t get it right). There was a pot of water on a table, and you had to stick your hand into it, and estimate its temperature. I stuck my hand in and thought: huh, this feels kind of cold, so it must be NN temperature (colder than room temperature). But it WAS room temperature (water has faster heat conduction than air, so water feels colder). I should have taken a logical, mental step backward and realized that the effort to continuously heat/cool the water to something other than room temperature wasn’t small – so the water almost certainly WAS room temperature. 😞
At the end of the competition, they summed up everyone’s scores across these various math problems to determine who won. And I did.
SUMMARY
So you might think that winning a competition in a relatively-small, backwards state might not be that big a deal, BUT it was multilevel (school, county, region, state) and required broad math thinking – so it was a genuine accomplishment. I essentially had the best math head of everyone my age in the entire state.
The modest trophy that I received for winning first place got broken over the years, so I recently bought a similar trophy to have an intact reminder of my win.