Walking into a Friday math club meeting, you would expect to see a group of dedicated students working diligently on problems or listening to a student-run lecture. Instead, you might be surprised to find yourself in front of a horde of squirrelly middle schoolers, working alongside the high school members on problems of equal difficulty.
Redwood Middle School students were first invited to the high school math club in the 2008-2009 school year, the club’s first year of existence. According to club adviser PJ Yim, the high school’s involvement in the Redwood math program inspired him to extend a hand to advanced middle school students.
“We identified who the strong kids were and invited them one at a time,” Yim said. “We just wanted to have half a dozen or so who we knew were not only good at math, but who we knew would continue to do math so we could make their transition [to the high school math club] easier.”
Another reason to invite the Redwood students, Yim said, was to challenge those bored with both their math class’s curriculum and the content of the extracurricular math program run by the high school club.
“Can you imagine [2011 graduate and mathlete] Albert Gu sitting in an Algebra 1 class? He would be bored out of his mind,” Yim said. “That’s essentially what’s going on at the middle school. There are a room full of 20-some kids, but five or six of them are at a totally different level.”
For example, eighth grader Sean Shi has been attending the high school math club since he was in sixth grade. In the years since, he has progressed mathematically beyond the level of most other students in the club. Last year, he scored a perfect score of 150 points on the American Mathematics Competition 10, an achievement most high school students could only dream of.
“I’m not that intimidated by the high-schoolers anymore, but I still mostly work with my own peers,” Shi said. “I like it here because it’s much more open and free, whereas in middle school we just sit down and listen to the lecture.”
Eighth-grader Celine Liang is another regular at the high school math club meetings. Though she moved from Harker this year, she prefers the math club here to the private school environment.
“I think it’s better here if you want to merge yourself in more math, because we do a lot of competitions here and practice a lot more,” Liang said. “In Harker we barely did any of that.”
Despite the progress made in recent years to integrate the Redwood students into the high school math club, however, Yim still feels that the difference between the younger students and the older ones is too stark, like “oil and water.”
Yet, although the younger students still have trouble transitioning comfortably into the high school environment, Yim believes their passion at such an early age will lead them to great success in the future.
“Most middle school kids don’t even know what kind of food they want in the morning, let alone that they love math,” Yim said. “Look at them, they’re driven by it. Nobody pushes them. In that sense I think they’re a lot more mature than a lot of 20-year-olds.
“They know what they like and they know what they want to do with their lives. In a way, they are some of the most enlightened people.”