Keys to Success

• Emphasize Understanding over memorization: learn basic principles, then derive other results as needed, as described in the article "What Is Problem Solving".

• Visualizing: Use your imagination to think in pictures, not symbols. Move sizes and shapes around in your head and on paper. Draw. Doodle. Artistic imagination helps with creative problem solving!

• Pondering problems and solutions deeply. Ask "why" or "how" a solution works, so you can later use it appropriately or creatively, or improve it.

• Exploring Other Viewpoints: Seek multiple ways to solve every problem by looking at it from different viewpoints. Seeing things from various points of view can help you creatively solve math problems, and more generally, can help you understand other people better as well. This leads to...

• Teamwork: Even if you can solve a problem, discussing it with others can help you see new ways of looking at it and solving it. Also, teaching a topic will help you understand it even more deeply. So, support your teammates! Help each other understand and learn.

A big key to success is to use the materials in the Learning Resources page every day, even if you can only spare 5 minutes on a given day. Daily consistency is more important than total weekly time, although both are important. (10 minutes every day gets you more benefit than 75 minutes each Saturday and nothing the rest of the week.)

To reach a high level, practice 30 to 60 minutes per day. This is not a requirement, just a guideline on what it takes to reach a high level.

To reach the national level, you'll need much more than an hour per day, probably more than two hours per day.
Then you might accomplish what former Ottoson student Jiahe Liu did in May 2022 (after moving to Ohio): 2022 Mathcounts National Competition awards

The "Teamwork" item above is so important, that we'll practice it at every meeting.

To make teamwork easier, remember that Math Team is open to students of all abilities. Invite friends to show up; no need to sign up ahead of time. Bring your friends in to make teamwork easier!

The only requirements:

• work hard,

• support your teammates in learning, in other words:

  • • do not distract teammates from learning math with unrelated discussions

    • focus on helping others understand, instead of "showing off" what you understand

Your team support is more important than your ability. Students who are consistently distracting and disruptive at practices will be disqualified from competing for the Mathcounts Team, and asked not to return to practices. How much you help teammates affects your rank when determining the Mathcounts teams for the Chapter meet in early February.

The above teamwork philosophies can be summed up in these two phrases:

1. "Within Math Team, we respect those who respect math"

2. "In general, we strive to improve worldwide problem solving ability"

So what happens when you're outside Math Team, and you encounter someone who says they hate math? Does the first phrase mean you don't respect them? No! That only applies within Math Team, but the second phrase applies in general. So "improve worldwide problem solving ability" by trying to convince them that math ain't so bad, you just need to look at it a different way.