Wednesday, October 21st 2015, the Hollis Brookline High School Math Team  traveled to Keene High School with a 1:15pm dismissal time. This was the first meet of the season for our Math Team.

Monthly math meets will take place on Wednesdays from October to February, yielding a total of five meets in total. The team travels to five different high schools: Keene, Pembroke Academy, Manchester West, Souhegan, and Nashua South.

“[We] encourage kids to come, if you don’t like it or have a conflict then you don’t have to come to all [of the meets],” Susan Mooers, one of the advisors for the Math Team states, “Someone might have a [sport] game this Wednesday or the trebuchet project.” Attendance to every math meet is not mandatory for the members of the Math Team.

There are currently 30-50 members on the Math Team. “It’s kind of neat; 30 people [come] to the meet and only 10 scores count, [so they] come to have fun,” the other Math Team advisor, Stacey Plummer says. If a student does better than one of the ten “varsity” team members on the math team then they can replace them the next meet and then the previous varsity member becomes an alternate.

Students have the chance to complete in three out of five categories including Arithmetic (which are more logic-based problems), Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2, and Advanced Mathematics (Precalculus/Trigonometry). The competing students have ten minutes to answer the three questions posed in each category, those questions are scored out of nine points on whether or not they got their final answer correct (there are no points given for work).

“[The meet] is not a big spotlight, as every school has only 10 student scores which count,” Plummer says, “Some schools work really hard to just get 10 people for their team.”

Plummer and Mooers worked together while teaching in Merrimack where they had a math team of their own. When they transferred to Hollis Brookline High School, Mooers says “She [Plummer] asked if I wanted to do math team with her again, and I said ‘yes, that’ll be awesome.”
At the meets there are typically a total of 400-500 students. “To be around hundreds of students who are equally thrilled about mathematics,” Mooers states, “to be able to talk to each other about different ways to solve the same problem, [as well as] talking to other people who are interested in math is very exciting.”