After a whirlwind of 48 hours, jumping between Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, and back again, I can safely say that my first time as a middle school math olympiad coach was a success. It was a very busy schedule and as I type this on Sunday morning after all of the chaos, I'm extremely exhausted. However, I would say that it's all worth it because my kids did awesome, the trip went off without a hitch, and I didn't loose a 7th grader in China!
In all seriousness, I was very proud of my team. I had three little seventh grade girls and one little seventh grade boy with me. Although we had some interesting situations, like making the emergency bathroom stop within an hour of the start of the trip, but I think that's fairly par for the course when traveling with children. In general they were very well behaved and actually really helpful because they could communicate with more people than I could for obvious language reasons. If I couldn't figure something out, I would send one of them to ask someone nearby and they turned out to be awesome little translators.
As far as the math competition went, I was even more proud of my team. My school has been sending a middle school team to this competition for several years now. I've been told that we always do pretty dismal so going into this trip I had very low expectations. As the teams were busy competing on the first floor of the school we were at, the coaches were up on the second floor grading everything and updating the scores. Throughout the competition, which was four rounds, I watched my team start at a tie for fifth place (out of seven teams), move up to fourth, and seal a third place victory with a perfect score in the third round of nineteen multiple choice questions. When the announcer called our name for the third place team from the 7th grade division during the awards ceremony, no one was yelling louder than me because I was so happy for them and it was cute to see their surprised faces (they kept telling me how bad they thought they did!).
All in all, a great but quick trip to China, an awesome math olympiad tournament and my first international travel with preteens under my belt. You can check out some of the pictures I took below.
The team and me outside the school in Shenzhen, China.
7th graders doing what 7th graders do best.
View of the harbor in Shenzhen.
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