For those uninitiated into the Mean Girls phenomenon, observe a dramatic scene from the single most quoted movie of our generation:
Now observe what an actual math competition looks like. Yeah, the real things are just written, timed tests. The exciting ones are the ones where you get to work in teams to solve the problems. Thrilling, right?
...Well—yes, surprisingly. I did these competitions up through high school, and they were actually a lot of fun. The speed and difficulty of the questions forced you to think creatively—it wasn't so much about the math as is was about the brain-bending challenge of creative problem solving, and you often did it collaboratively. That ability to strip a problem down to simple, solvable terms has been a huge asset in my life, and I attribute most of it to having been a "mathlete."
But here's the problem: being a mathlete isn't cool. As much great exposure we got in Mean Girls, the geeky stigma remains. Unfortunately, that stigma also extends beyond mathletics (okay, I swear that's the last pun). I recently spoke with a high school math teacher who told me that kids in his lower-tier classes are socially pressured into feigned apathy and mediocre performance. If they try to excel, they are ridiculed ("NERD!") and shunned by their classmates for making the curve tougher for the class. It's a depressing spiral that's probably contributed in some small way to the problem with STEM education in the US.
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