So another year, another Mathcounts.
Unfortunately this time around, we didn’t have any schools come in for the tournament, but we still had a good in-house competition.
The kids worked hard – well, at least on the tests. I’m thinking that many of the practices during the year were more of an excuse to get free popcorn than to study math 
But they were tearing their hair out on the tougher problems and put on a fantastic show for the elementary students who came to watch the countdown round.
Of course, I think the highlight of the weekend was seeing the kids’ expressions when we pulled out the team t-shirts: they absolutely loved them! And it was also funny to see the reactions on the many adults’ faces (cough* Susan *cough) who don’t understand what they say.
Dave, on the other hand, is so cool as a middle school teacher that he came up with the slogan and thinks it is a pretty darn good one for a math team:
(ask a middle schooler if you need a translation…)
Saturday was a full day at school. Dave got up early to go in for middle school girls’ volleyball practice (no, he’s not playing on the team – he’s coachingthe team!). Breck’s indoor soccer season then wrapped up this weekend with a tournament that afternoon at the school. The kids played hard and stuffed themselves between games on all the food parents had brought for the pot luck dinner. Alea got to go swimming during some of the matches, as one of her friends was at school (also to watch her brother – who was on Breck’s team – play in the tournament). In the end, his team ended up with a 4th place trophy, lots of smiles all around, and some standing invitations for play dates.
We held ASB’s first ever Mathcounts competition this weekend, and I think things went off pretty well. We’ve had up to 16 kids coming for practices, but with other events (including an Iron Maiden concert here in Bombay – talk about a phrase I never imagined ever writing in my life!) we had 8 show up for the meet. That works out perfectly, though, as the team events involve 4 kids on each team, so we had 2 groups to go head to head.When the individual events finished on Friday, we had one person who was clearly ahead of the pack, but then a big logjam behind him. Our team competition on Saturday was very close, and our individual “Countdown Round” was a huge success, with several upsets and people changing final placement.
I think the parents enjoyed the day as much as the kids, and the pizza afterwards didn’t hurt. We had really sweet looking trophies made, and hopefully the ‘buzz’ generated by the event will help get even more participation in ‘doing math’ as we go forward. All in all, a great end to our activity and a great start to the weekend.
Well the kids are in bed, but the fireworks are just starting to go off all over. It is Eid, the end of a month of fasting for Mulsims, and our neighbors downstairs are gearing up for a big party tonight. I wonder how that will compare with the 
Had the big elementary school soccer tournament today – last day of coaching for me (yay!). We went 2-0-1, but the team we tied won on goal differential. Oh well, it was a fun day in the sun. The tough part about it was that Breck wanted to be on the team, but there were only 12 allowed (and 63 went out). Kind of a rough deal to have to make cuts in grades 1 through 3.