Even though the principal left the football head coach position vacant until August, the appointment of the new football head coach went unnoticed simply because it was a foregone conclusion.
Fast-forward to November 2022. It seems like the athletic cuts ran deep, since the Venomous Agendas were mediocre in all fall sports, be it cross-country, swimming, volleyball or football. For the last one, the booster club had to pick up the tab for the players whose parents couldn't pay for 2 uniforms. By the time the AMC12 was finished, this extracurricular disaster ate at the morale of the math team, but even a middling quiz bowl or debate team is unremarkable among the student body. So unremarkable that not even players on the academic teams are clueless about how the other teams performed despite some of the players on it being close friends to each other.
The principal shows up briefly at a math team practice subsequent to the AMC12, telling the team about the situation of the school's extracurriculars:
"Ladies and gentlemen, things have been going badly for Venomous Agenda athletics. It now falls on you, mathletes, to accomplish what the sports teams couldn't" Glen proceeds to tell the mathletes. "However, do you have any plan to accomplish this?"
"Color me biased, but if we make it to the USAMO, it will send a strong message to the rest of the state that rural regions can and do perform at the highest mathletic levels" Gen answers the principal.
"I get that you two markedly improved over the summer, Éliane and Gen, but the USAMO is a pipe dream. We must find another way to accomplish what the sports teams couldn't" Trent points out, looking at both Éliane and Gen.
Right now, there is nothing to make the town proud of us. Debate and quiz bowl both fly under the radar, and it appears that it would not help us live with academic excellence in an ungendered way the way mathletics would, Glen muses, while realizing that the savings made in making professional development targeted were used for equally targeted HVAC repairs instead.
Of course, I don't want this season to end that quickly, but at the same time, we must pick carefully any further contests we enter this season! Éliane muses, while she searches for potential contests to enter that could be done remotely and don't interfere with potential AIME and possibly USAMO participation. Speaking of USAMO, qualifying for it requires potential entrants to score a minimum index score based on the AMC12 and 10 times the score on the AIME.
"But why focus on mathletics? Why not quiz bowl? Or, for that matter, debating?" Bo, another mathlete, asks the principal about this focus on mathletics as an extracurricular priority by the principal.
"Attending debate tournaments, especially in-person, is much more expensive on a per-student basis than mathletics or even quiz bowl because debate tournaments tend to be multi-day and quiz bowl tournaments are one-day. Or so I could glean from an analysis of expenses incurred by both teams. It would then follow that mathletics is the most cost-effective way to fill that void" Glen explains about the financial aspect of running all 3 academic teams.
"Now I understand"
The school the VAs call the "neighboring parish" also runs into the same financial problems, especially since debate and quiz bowl are new to them this season. As such, no one expects much out of the neighboring parish in any of these activities even though they might have a handful of smarter kids on hand. But just a handful of them.
Éliane, the black female mathlete, then keeps looking for potential tournaments for the Venomous Agendas to attend and held remotely. With all the caveats this carries: no discussions on the test items may take place online until a certain deadline is past. Notwithstanding that southwest Louisiana is functionally cut off from the rest of the country as it relates to mathletics.
"I think I found a promising lead, especially since several of us are in AP Calculus BC, we should use this to our advantage. The Square Root of the Answer (SRA)" Éliane then explains to the rest of the group.
"How much does this cost and when is it? Also, what's the deadline to enter it?" Trent asks Éliane as the principal is about to leave.
"As far as the SRA is concerned, the contest is about the entirety of the AP Calculus BC course, held in early January. Our deadline to register for it is December sixteenth, and costs twenty dollars per entrant, with a minimum of four players per team" Éliane answers her teacher regarding this query.
"Please, let us enter it! We might be able to fit in some extra credit for that course so that everyone taking the course can benefit!" Gen then pleads with her teacher.
"How do you want to implement the extra credit when people have so much work already with this course?" Trent retorts to his star mathletes.
"At this point, the extra credit is about reading and using the material now so that they won't be completely lost when the material will be covered more formally later" Gen answers him, matter-of-factly.
For far too long, the focus at school has been on sports; now it's no longer the case. Sports are not the end of the story. Now it seems like sports mediocrity has set in, but it's the price to pay for effecting the change I want to implement. By now they know mathletics is cheaper but I'm nervous about Éliane seemingly placing the team's future into the hands of a brand-new contest. Yet, I wonder what the landscape of mathletics is really like, whether there really is a place for impoverished schools like ours to actually amount to something, Glen then leaves the scene, with a lot of questions he needs to find answers to so that he doesn't jeopardize his school's future by his actions.
"That said, the organizers have been a little opaque as to what the second round will entail, only that there are two routes to get to it: either score the highest in the state or get past a certain threshold for non-state-champions" Éliane then explains the implications of entering the tournament.
"Presumably because they want to buy themselves more time beforehand. Everything depends on the field and their performance during round one. While I believe it's realistic to make it to the second round, we're going to need more practices" Gen makes her analysis, not knowing whether there is going to be another Louisiana team at the SRA. "From now until the SRA we need to practice more on the later chapters of calculus, and then we can devote the practice time to the AIME"
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"Wait a minute: you two are doing as if we actually are going to enter it. If any of you didn't already take, or aren't taking AP Calculus BC concurrently, you aren't able to compete at the SRA. Nevertheless, before we enter it, we would like the players to vote" Trent announces.
The cold, hard truth is that 4 of the 7 Venomous Agenda mathletes, including both of its girls, are taking that course. Surprisingly, Bo, one of the other 3 mathletes, votes for the team to enter the contest, while the other 2 don't.
"By a vote of five to two, we are going to enter the Square Root of the Answer! But we're going to need to enter one more contest later in the season for those who aren't taking AP Calculus BC, and maybe include them if we fail to make it to the second round of the SRA" Trent announces to them. "Starting today, we will practice every day after school for two hours per day. Since it was Éliane's idea, she will handle the registration for that contest and I will simply put my name and payment information, and then we will start formulating a plan so that you can be ready to take the AP Calculus BC in early January. Everyone else we need to wait until the plan for the SRA participant is formulated so that we can pick another mathletic contest to enter that's more appropriate to take part in"
Éliane then enters all the names of the 4 players of the school's team taking part in the SRA, including gender and grade before filling out the rest of the form.
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That night, around the dinner table, Glen has a discussion with Valerie regarding, well, mathletics.
"How has your day been?" Glen asks his youngest two children, but Dexter keeps quiet for some reason.
"Dad, today was the first tournament of our math team's season" Valerie then tells her dad.
"Good. I know it's hard work but keep at it. How did the tournament go?"
"It went well for me"
Already this town even has mathletics at the middle school level at all. Obviously not many kids play on the middle school team, and somehow the principal of the town's middle school saw fit to use ESSER money to get mathletics started as after-school enrichment.
"I'll even give you the AMC-twelve our own high school mathletes were given earlier this week" Glen then instructs his daughter.
"Are you crazy, dad?" Dexter confronts his father as he gives the questionnaire of the AMC12 the Venomous Agendas were facing.
"I believe the AMC-twelve is inappropriate for our daughter as training material at this point in her education" Selena also confronts her husband.
"Yeah, who do you think Valerie is? Do you want her to turn into Imélie two point oh?" Dexter asks another question of his father.
Glen turns to Dexter. "What do you mean, I'm turning Valerie into another Imélie? And what makes me crazy?" he asks his son while his stress level is increasing.
"All I ever heard about Imélie was that she was traumatized by what she viewed as failing a math test" Selena then mentions what she knew about Imélie's case.
Is Dexter somehow implying that Imélie was pushed too hard, too early? The difference between Imélie and Valerie is that Valerie was exposed to mathletics in middle school, whereas Imélie wasn't. This year is the first time Jennings Middle School even have mathletics! Glen reflects on the history of mathletics in town.
"On a more joyous note, our high school math team is going to enter the Square Root of the Answer. While I have my reservations about this contest, I guess better a calculus contest than no contest at all" Glen comments on this meeting of the math team.
"I hope you realize there just isn't a whole lot of mathletics going on in this state. So many schools in rural regions of this state wouldn't even be able to form a math team, and even some urban schools. Our main opponents are going to be these elite schools in the main four cities of the state" Selena adds. "You try too hard to make our high school like the Benjamin-Franklins and Isidore Newmans of this world"
"Except that I inherited a school that was mostly a sports club first and a school second. Fingers crossed that there aren't too many of them playing. Also, our budget is much more limited than in these places. If what I heard about the SRA is correct, the first round will force our resident math geeks to learn calculus at a much more intensive pace" Glen points out.
"But even they are still human, and their learning speed is finite. They must juggle other courses as well. Maybe I question whether Éliane and her gang truly can learn the remainder of the material of AP Calculus BC by the end of the holidays" Dexter retorts. "They never struck me as people who would neglect their coursework for a contest"
"Same goes for me, too, I'm human, I can't learn as fast as you would all like!" Valerie adds to this cacophony of laments.
Certainly, in my life as an educator and as an administrator, I noticed that girls tended to work hard across subjects. Like Catalena; she's on her class' math and language arts priority sorting lists. But I feel like the male players on the math team at the SRA – assuming they aren't taking AP Physics concurrently – would be more likely to neglect other courses for the SRA. Mathletes are usually good in all STEM subjects, but beyond that they're all over the place. You get more one-dimensional mathletes like, well, one of the two male mathletes at the SRA. You can also get someone academically good all around, like both Éliane and Gen, Glen then muses on his children's remarks regarding whether these 4 mathletes would really be up to the task.
Yet, it was generally considered that taking AP Calculus BC and AP Physics concurrently was beneficial for both. But the only one of the four who doesn't take both concurrently is Gen: the other three are doing it.
"Look, Valerie, I want you not to suffer the same mathletic fate as Imélie. Imélie was thrown off the deep end, and the AMC-twelve proved that, while she excelled at mathematical topics that were within what she learned in class, she crumbled in combinatorics and number theory. Éliane and Gen, on the other hand, took it in stride and learned as much as possible out of the missing material" Glen explains what traumatized Imélie.
"All right, Imélie was a nut case, but that doesn't explain why I should go study from a past AMC-twelve, with a focus on number theory and combinatorics" Valerie rants about mathletics.
"And pre-calculus topics, too" Selena adds to this chain of laments.
"The mathletics team made their bed, they must sleep in it now" Dexter quips, before he leaves the scene.
What Valerie does not realize is that pre-calculus is also on the menu of the AMC12. The SRA, calculus may as well be on Mars as far as I'm concerned, Valerie muses while her brother's words dance in her head.
"Number theory: is it, like, prime numbers, factors and stuff like that?" Valerie asks her father, not sure about what number theory is, and equally unsure of what combinatorics is. However, she might have encountered problems in combinatorics without knowing that it was combinatorics.
Her father then explains what number theory and combinatorics are, and the kinds of problems she encountered in these branches.
And little did Glen know was that other Louisiana schools were very reluctant to compete in the Square Root of the Answer. Not even Isidore Newman, Bâton-Rouge and Caddo Magnets entered this tournament, who were otherwise the schools everyone else in the state held in high regard for academic achievement in the extracurricular arena. He has trouble sleeping, believing he wagered the football team's money on an endeavor as diametrically opposed to it as mathletics, and the future of the school along with it. He was tormented by other stakeholders in the tournament.
"The Venomous Agendas made a big mistake by gutting its athletics in favor of academic extracurriculars!" an oneiric Falcon mathlete (i.e., a Benjamin-Franklin student) shouted at him in a dream.
"Entering the Square Root of the Answer means wagering the Venomous Agendas' nascent reputation!" an out-of-state school administrator then yelled at him in the same dream and circling around him.
"Was mathletics the way to go for the VAs to make a name for themselves? Never mind how cost-effective mathletics really is to effect a turnaround" Glen started to harbor doubts, but because the school didn't seem to follow its sports teams as much, they started putting in more work on academics. Especially when the football season ended 1-9.