The yearly ICTM Regional Math Competition is upon us again; at the large and very labyrinthine College of Dupage (COD) as usual.
Andy had no surprises for us. We all know about his laptop and DC/AC power inverter and wireless access point and internet capability in IL-53’s left lane. I got to pick the tunes this time. I usually don’t since my trusty but scruffy HP nc6000 has had battery sensor troubles; my battery voltage graph is a titration curve; it goes from “full” to 0% in a matter of minutes and the projected remaining charge times range from 3 minutes to 41 hours. The OS is just as misinformed as I am, so setting the thing to shut down when battery level is dangerously low is ineffectual. The old girl is getting on in years. I might be replacing her after graduation. Until then, I can just use the bus power from the ciggie lighter. My music is largely a scant couple of gigabytes of Top 40 from the last nine years. It received no complaints from bus riders, save that one song from Cannibal! The Musical.
Every math meet, I lament the loss (or “graduation”) of last year’s seniors, known to Cassidy as “the freaks”. Greta, Sam, Keith, Dan, Kushal. They took me to Champagne with them last year in the Junior-Senior 8-person team. Same goes for Scholastic Bowl. Damn those freaks for leaving.
This day was a damn big deal for all of us. Today’s tests decide if we’re going to Champagne or not. So I was at an emergency math team practice yesterday for two hours. I learned summation notation and standard deviation.
We arrived and had ten minutes to run to the individual tests. I had to drop off all my stuff and only then did I realize that I had worn my Scholastic Bowl shirt. Whoops.
There’s individual, oralist, 2-person freshman/sophomore, 2-person junior/senior, 8-person freshman/sophomore, 8-person junior/senior, calculator team. That’s about it.
I started the individual competition with high hopes. The first page was straightforward except for the last one. I knew how to do ’em, that is. I wasn’t able to do the last half though. I didn’t see a standard deviation or a sum. but I did see a “root mean square”. All I remember about it is when I looked at it in the Precalculus book and thinking it was hard and not learning it. Apparently it’s just, wait for it, the square root of the average of the squares. And there was a bunch of other stuff I messed up just purely for lack of logic. I ended up getting only four or so right with the cutoff at eleven. D’oi. Similarly with the 8-person. We were two problems short of qualification; one if Walthers’ appeal went through.
The years before, I did only individual and 8-person. But today, they put me on calculator team. It’s basically like the 8-person, except with all grade levels represented and the problems almost never have whole numbers. I answered 2 of the twenty, I think. I can see why this test is so hard. It is so easy to mess up parentheses. We got eleven problems right. We qualified for state because the minimum is ten. Meredith also qualified individually. So it’s only the six of us this year.
PS The second half of this post was composed in a Southern accent due to me watching Forrest Gump while writing it.