1/8 Semi Prime kind of Life

Everyone’s finally back from Winter Break and as you can see from the out take above in good spirits.  If you’ve been following along you might also notice the slightly larger numbers of kids. After signups finished and I forgot to turn off the google form my enrollment crept up to 17. (There’s one girl who’s Mom didn’t register her but wanted to continue that I’m still trying to work on) In the end, I decided I could handle a few extra students and I’m actually excited about the new kids who have joined.  However, since there were enough of them I definitely needed to do introductions again to start the day off.  As usual I had everyone go around and say:

• Name
• Math Class
• Why they joined or what they enjoyed the most during the Fall if they were returning.

There were a few trends I noticed. Game day continues to be really popular. I also have a core group of really competitive students who love activities like taking the AMC. My challenge here is to emphasize that its fine to not be into contests too. And I have a few new kids who’s reason for coming is their parents signed them up. That’s not my favorite motivation but I’ve had much better luck in the last few years making converts over the sessions. So I’ll be working on that front as well.

I then once again went over an abbreviated set of talking points

• Non-negotiables: respect the room, each other and me. Listen when I’m giving group instructions.
• What to do when you’re stuck. This is always a chance to go around the room and have lots of kids speak about what they do.
• Questions are a theme and I want you to come up with lots of them.
• Basic procedures i.e. the problem of the week and Mathcounts signup.

At this point we took a break to take the photo from above.  My motivation here was we made the AMC School Merit Roll based on the team score on AMC 8.  This was a huge jump from last year and I’m super excited about it. As a result, we’re going to have a small article in the student newspaper.

Before really getting going we then talked a bit about the new largest prime discovered during the break.

Largest Known Prime Number discovered! It is: 2^(82,589,933) - 1. The newly discovered prime is more than one and a half million digits larger than the previous record prime number, and it is the 51st known Mersenne Prime.

My main focus here is that Mathematics is a living field with new discoveries happening all the time. 

Finally, as is traditional I started putting 2019 problems up on the whiteboard.

The first challenge was to determine whether 2019 is prime and if not what is its prime factorization.

As a group I always go over factoring and how to do big numbers and then let the kids break off on their own in groups. 

Link to sets of problems: http://bit.ly/2AqVymV

From there I let the process go organically and various clusters chose different problems to focus on. I ended up working on a variety of problem solving techniques with various kids during this process i.e. how to search for patterns in the factorials or digit decoding ideas.  One standout moment for me: was a throw away comment from a girl about how she was bad a long division. In fact, she was doing totally fine. I pointed this out and tried to emphasize that practice will make you more confident. (Note: most of the kids have graphing calculators with them and tend to slightly overuse them even when they won’t work i.e investigating 2019^2019)

Overall I think day had good flow despite the growth in overall club size. I left feeling energized and ready to figure out something more ambitious for next week when we’ll have the whole hour for math.

Problem of the Week:

This one is from MathCounts which I plan to use a lot in the weeks building up to the chapter contest.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1U5me3x4LpSH0pN_Tcs9RyDPilQqVTC40MJreWVCCosk