## Monday, March 26, 2012

### "Dumb" questions and STEM bullies

I hasten to point out that the folks in these pictures are most definitely NOT bullies!

They are the Stanford professors who have been teaching some wonderful on-line classes that I have been taking this year.  In the fall, I took Introduction to Artificial Intelligence with Professors Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun.  (They were amazing.  Among other things, Prof. Thrun headed the Stanford team that designed and built the driverless car that won the DARPA desert challenge.  He has an inspiring Ted Talk that I highly recommend.)  Now I am taking Probabilistic Graphical Models with Professor Daphne Koller.  (Her photo above is from wikipedia.  This NYT article tells a bit more about the cool work she does.)

There are tens of thousands of students all over the world taking these classes along with me, and students helping one another on the course discussion boards has been an essential and exciting part of the learning process.

There is absolutely no way that Professors Thrun, Norvig, and Koller or the few official teaching assistants who help them could answer all our questions.  There are so many unanticipated sources of confusion and technical difficulties (for example, some students live in countries where they use commas instead of periods to denote decimal points, people are using many different operating systems on their computers, for many students English is a second language, etc.)   I am once again struck by the spirit of generosity among my classmates.   While observing the rules of the Stanford Honor Code (which prohibit giving help on the substantive content of graded homework assignments), my classmates have generously provided assistance in dealing with various technical issues that have arisen with downloading and installing and running the required software.  This has been very helpful to many of us.

However, very occasionally there is an obnoxious comment posted on the discussion boards making a snide remark such as "Anyone who asks such a dumb question clearly does not belong in this class."

I cringe when I read remarks like these.  I think of the people who make such posts as STEM bullies.

My feeling is that the askers of the questions DO belong in the course.  The ones who do NOT belong are those who put others down for asking "dumb questions".

I feel the same way about our math circle as I do about the on-line classes I am taking.

Thus, I was heartened to read this powerful post on the subject of "dumb questions" by Professor Thrun--it captures my own beliefs so well that I wanted to share it--I will be reading this aloud at this Friday's math circle:

I really hope that this new digital medium makes it easier to ask "stupid" questions. Let me report on myself. I work with a 200+ people team at Google (reporting into me), I co-founded Udacity, I am an authority in my area of research. I ask many many "stupid" questions. I have learned that asking questions is power. The problem is if others respond to such questions with "you should have known." People rarely do this to me, but they do this to my students. I really dislike this, and I usually confront them. We should remember that there is NO learning without asking questions. In this class, there are people with many different levels of knowledge and skills. What brings us together at this point is that we are all 100% dedicated to make this class. be kind. Reach out to people asking questions whose answer appears trivial to you. Be a friend. And make a friend. remember the question that seems obvious to you once was non-obvious to you. You find that people respect you for being kind. Being kind is one of the highest levels of achievement. I will respect you for it, and so will the people around you. There will come the day when you are asking the stupid question - and you will appreciate the kindness of others.

## Saturday, March 3, 2012

### Young student honors

The American Mathematics Competition has a special national public honor list for students who score high on a contest designed for older students.

Congratulations to the following students who made those national honor lists this year:

AMC12A:
(Students in tenth grade or below with scores over 90)
Cecilia Holodak (Niskayuna HS) 99

AMC12B:
(Students in tenth grade or below with scores over 90)
Matt Gu (Guilderland HS) 93

AMC10A:
(Students in eighth grade or below with scores over 90)

 Alex Wei Van Antwerp MS 127.5 William Wang Farnsworth MS 123 Patrick Chi Iroquois MS 120 Ziqing Dong Farnsworth MS 117 Junsu Park Albany Academies 113 Andrei Ahkmetov Van Antwerp 105 Liam McGrinder Van Antwerp 105 Gideon Schmidt Iroquois MS 102 Jason Tang Van Antwerp 100.5 Chenyang Wang Shaker JHS 99 Alex Cao Shaker JHS 93 Luke Lubel O'Rourke MS 90

AMC10B:
(Students in eighth grade or below with scores over 90)

 Alex Wei Van Antwerp MS 135 Ziqing Dong Farnsworth MS 126 William Wang Farnsworth MS 124.5 Jason Tang Van Antwerp MS 118.5 Andrei Akhmetov Van Antwerp MS 108 Alex Cao Shaker JHS 108 Patrick Chi Iroquois MS 106.5 Liam McGrinder Van Antwerp MS 103.5 Vladimir Malcevik Van Antwerp MS 99 Gwenda Law O'Rourke MS 97.5

Students with light blue backgrounds behind their names are members of Albany Area Math Circle and/or our affiliated middle school outreach programs.  (If you know any of the others--or any other local students who might enjoy our math circle activities, please invite them to subscribe to our email lists by sending an email to AlbanyAreaMathCircle-subscribe@yahoogroups.com for high school students and their parents or middleschoolmathcircle-subscribe@yahoogroups.com for parents of middle school students.)

### Congratulations to our American Invitational Math Exam qualifiers

Congratulations to all the Albany area students who embraced the "extreme math" challenge of this year's AMC10 and AMC12 contests.

Here are the criteria for invitation to the AIME along with the honor lists:

American Invitational Math Exam (AIME) qualification:
115.5 or above on AMC10A
120 or above on AMC10B
94.5 or above on AMC12A
99 or above on AMC12B

Congratulations and best wishes to the following students from the Albany area who have qualified to take the AIME, the next step in a series of progressively more challenging mathematics exams leading to the International Mathematics Olympiad.

American Invitational Math Exam (AIME)
AMC12B qualifiers:
Matthew Babbitt (heeg) 117

Wyatt Smith (heeg) 114

Elizabeth Parizh (Niskayuna HS) 99

American Invitational Math Exam (AIME)
AMC10B qualifiers:
Alex Wei (Van Antwerp MS) 135
Ziqing Dong (Farnsworth MS) 126
William Wang (Farnsworth MS) 124.5

American Invitational Math Exam (AIME)
AMC12A qualifiers:
Matthew Babbitt (heeg) 130.5
Zubin Mukerjee (Guilderland HS) 102
Sherry He (Emma Willard School) 101
Cecilia Holodak (Niskayuna HS) 99
Wyatt Smith (heeg) 99

J Chung (Emma Willard School) 95

American Invitational Math Exam (AIME)
AMC10A qualifiers

Alex Wei (Van Antwerp MS) 127.5
Philip Sun (Shenendahoah HS East) 126
William Wang (Farnsworth MS) 123
Patrick Chi (Iroquois MS) 120

Vineet Velandula (Niskayuna HS) 120
Ziqing Dong (Farnsworth MS) 117

Gili Rusak (Shaker HS) 117

Students with light blue backgrounds behind their names are members of Albany Area Math Circle and/or our affiliated middle school outreach programs.  (If you know any of the others--or any other local students who might enjoy our math circle activities, please invite them to subscribe to our email lists by sending an email to AlbanyAreaMathCircle-subscribe@yahoogroups.com for high school students and their parents or middleschoolmathcircle-subscribe@yahoogroups.com for parents of middle school students.)

Please report any errors or omissions by sending email to mathcircle at gmail.