One of my favorite Djikstra programming quotes is about thinking via “lines of code spent” rather than “lines of code produced”. I started using this as a philosophy in my writing too: words spent.

Background

One of the things that’s surprised me about student writing is how poorly words are spent. You’ll have a solution where the trivial boilerplate steps are painfully verbose, and then the actually important parts are missing all the critical details.

I wonder how much of this is because of crummy writing advice. In school essays, even when you have nothing meaningful to say, teachers often impose a minimum word countIn ninth grade, my English teacher preferred the euphemism “develop your ideas” for “write more words”. It wasn’t until halfway through the year I realized why she kept writing that on all my essays. as a “proof of work”. The implied conclusion …

There are a lot of different kinds of math enrichment activities now, ranging from olympiads to math circles to tons of summer programs and so on. I work in the competition sphere, and I used to spend a lot of time worrying about whether I took the right side.

Now that I’m a bit older, I came to the realization that maybe I don’t need to be so intent on comparing my work to others (even though I realize comparing yourself to others is human nature, haha). I eventually told myself: there are lots of people who don’t like olympiad exams; there are also lots of people who do, and it’s just okay for them to co-exist. We don’t need to decide which of the N systems is the best and kill the other N-1, because “best” is so different from person to person anyway …

1. Glazed carrots

Okay. Imagine you’re, like, trying to make glazed carrots or something.

Maybe a really simplified recipe looks something like:

1. Cut your carrots into suitably sized pieces with a knife.
2. Use a measuring spoon to get the right amount of oil, sugar, salt, etc.
3. Throw the carrots and other ingredients into a frying pan.
4. Serve the carrots on a plate.

You’ll notice that there were a bunch of different tools you used. The knife was used to cut the carrots into pieces. The measuring spoon was used to get the right amounts of other ingredients. And the plates are just there for the presentation of your dish. All these tools are things you see in any kitchen, but they do a single, completely unrelated thing.

Now imagine someone asks you:

I’m confused, why do people use a measuring spoon for cooking? Why not just use …

Where do all the smart, curious, earnest kids go these days?

One of my friends asked me this recently, and I wasn’t sure what to say. In the last ten years, something has changed.

If I had to summarize my concerns in one sentence, I would say this: kids these days no longer feel they’re allowed to work on what they’re interested in or excited about. Instead, they feel obligated to work on whatever happens to be considered the most “important” (or “prestigious”) thing possible.It’s for this reason I consider ambition as a double-edged sword. When ambition isn’t accompanied by excitement, earnestness, curiosity, or interest, it doesn’t usually end well.

But let me do a bit of story-telling.

Hobbies

When I was kid, math contests were seen as a hobby, or sport, or game. Those were the good old days.

Today, that’s …

This post is a short chrono-logue about my time with the card game Hanabi, which I play with the H-group. Thus, it’s also implicitly an advertisement for why I enjoy the game Hanabi so much.

I think the progression is a bit interesting because it can be divided into almost discrete “stages”, with each stage feeling really different from the last.

0. Casual in-person play: a memory game

Like many other people in my age group, I first met the card game Hanabi in-person at some summer math camp or other (either MOP or SPARC?). The rules are pretty simple to explain, so it’s popular. But we didn’t have much strategy behind it. We had the idea that we played from left to right, a clue means “play all”, and some form of a Finesse-type blind play.

That meant the game felt kind of like a …

Sometimes people ask me how many of my students made the IMO, and if I’m in a bad mood I often give the super snarky reply, “I lost track”.The good-mood answer is “a lot”.

That’s actually a white lie. The real answer is “I deliberately don’t keep track”. And in this post I want to explain why.

It’s definitely human nature to be happy when your students succeed, the same way it’s human nature to be happy when your selfies get hearts. In moderation, that seems fine. I think it’s unlikely I ever reach a point where I never brag about OTIS at all.

But there is a fine line between the following two implications:

• “I’m super proud of my kids, look what they did.”
• “I’m super proud of myself, look what my kids did.”

Without naming anyone in particular, I …

Sometime this week the American Math Competitions released the following new policy:

For the IMO, EGMO, RMM, TSTSTs, and TSTs, and MOP, students must be US citizens or US permanent residents. Visas are not a valid substitute. (AMC Policies)

I want to make a rather brief statement on why I was opposed to this change. To do this I want to draw an analogy. In the American Math Competitions, students are asked what gender they identify with, which is used to determine whether they are eligible for the European Girl’s Math Olympiad and also for invitations to MOP.

This means that in theory, you could try to abuse the system by deliberately misrepresenting your self-identified gender. But in practice, nobody has attempted this. So, we continue to allow students to self-identify their gender, in order to make sure to be inclusive to students with gender dysphoria, and trusting our …

I’m now going to say something explicitly that I hinted at in June: I don’t think a student deserves to make MOP more because they had a higher score than another student.

I think it’s easy to get this impression because the selection for MOP is done by score cutoffs. So it sure looks that way.

But I don’t think MOP admissions (or contests in general) are meant to be a form of judgment. My primary agenda is to run a summer program that is good for its participants, and we get funding for N of them. For that, it’s not important which N students make it, as long as they are enthusiastic and adequately prepared. (Admittedly, for a camp like MOP, “adequately prepared” is a tall order). If anything, what I would hope to select for is the people who would get the most …

Up to now I always felt a little saddened when I see people drop out of the IMO or EGMO team selection. But actually, really I should be asking myself what I (as a coach) could do better to make sure the students know we value their effort, even if they ultimately don’t make the team.

Because we sure do an awful job of being supportive of the students, or, well, really doing anything at all. There’s no practice material, no encouragement, or actually no form of contact whatsoever. Just three unreasonably hard problems each month, followed by a score report about a week later, starting in December and dragging in to April.

One of a teacher’s important jobs is to encourage their students. And even though we get the best students in the USA, probably we shouldn’t skip that step entirely, especially given the level …

While making preparations for this year’s MOP, I imagined to myself what I would say on orientation night if I was director of the camp, and came up with the following speech. I thought it might be nice to share on this blog. Of course, it represents my own views, not the actual views of MOP or MAA. And since I am not actually director of MOP, the speech was never given.

People sometimes ask me, why do we have international students at MOP? Doesn’t that mean we’re training teams from other countries? So I want to make this clear now: the purpose of MOP is not to train and select future IMO teams.

I know it might seem that way, because we invite by score and grade. But I really think the purpose of MOP is to give each one of you the experience of working …