The Spark Ignited by AMC: Finding and Spreading the Beauty in Math

By Hannah Guan, @hannahguan_, @_hannahguan

I hated math when my mom signed me up for my first math club in sixth grade. I hated the simplicity of the class curriculum. I hated the 50 formulas we had to learn again and again each year. I hated the way I was punished for trying to teach my friends a different method for solving equations. I hated everything about math.

Hannah Guan

However, that all changed during my first year in the math club. Ever since that first sheet of American Mathematics Competitions (AMC) practice problems was handed out onto my desk, I was in love. By practicing for and participating in the AMC competitions, I found out I was actually sensitive to numbers and patterns and enjoyed solving them. People may think math is abstract, but when I think of math, I think of life, with every topic in math acting as a different mechanism that we enjoy but never notice. We can find number theory in the different wallpaper patterns lining our houses. We can see probability every time we sign up for classes before the school year begins, hoping we’ll land in an enjoyable class with a good teacher and close friends. We can find geometry in the curves of the sidewalks we walk on. And, finally, we can see algebra and calculus holding up the buildings we enter every day.

As my skills grew, I began to think about and research the way math is taught in the U.S. In the U.S., mathematics achievement lags behind many other countries. In the 2015 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the U.S. ranked 38th out of 71 countries. Of the 35 industrialized nations that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the U.S. ranked in the bottom 15 percent at number 31. The 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that only 34 percent of eighth-graders tested proficient in math at grade level. I quickly realized the problem isn’t that our students are inherently unable to understand math; it’s the way that math is taught in school. Because of the emphasis on the very exams on which students underperform, kids aren’t able to creatively think their own way through each problem. They’re taught to just crunch out the numbers again and again and again. Even worse, this method of teaching disproportionately affects students from underrepresented groups. According to the 2019 NAEP, in Texas, Black students had an average score 21 points lower than that of white students, and Latino students were falling behind their white peers by a similar amount, 19 points.

I realized that as STEM innovation increased at phenomenal rates around the world, the lackluster efforts of schools to teach their students math would only result in American students, especially those in underrepresented communities, falling behind even more. So at age eleven, I founded San Antonio Math Include (SaMi) to provide greater access to meaningful math education to all students from different backgrounds, experiences, and cultural perspectives. I wanted children all over the globe to realize that creativity—and not memorization—is at the root of math. I wanted them to be able to appreciate the beauty in math and its applications as I did when I started the AMC series.

Math has more than one value. Everyone is unique and will be able to offer their own experiences and knowledge that others may not possess. Providing equitable access to education and supporting tolerance of those who have different backgrounds and cultural perspectives undeniably benefits our society. It helps me grow to be a world citizen. It inspires me with new ideas, views, and practices to equip youth to make and create our world of tomorrow.

My dream is to become a math professor in the future so I can help people appreciate math in so many more ways. Participating in the AMC was the first step towards this goal. The next step is to become an educator because that is one of the most direct ways to make an impact, especially on female and minority students like myself.

Hannah Guan is a junior at Basis San Antonio Shavano in San Antonio, TX. She was an international math champion at the 2018 Primary Mathematics World Competition in Hong Kong and currently participates in the USA Mathematical Olympiad. Her areas of research are Biomathematics and Statistical Learning. She has published journal papers and presented research in leading conferences in these areas. Recently, she won the Best Poster Award in the 12th ACM International Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics. She founded San Antonio Math Include to provide greater access to math education to all students from different backgrounds, experiences, and cultural perspectives across the country and around the world.

Interested in learning more about the American Mathematics Competitions? Learn more at https://bit.ly/3EkCOVL.