Math team heads to state
By Daniel Wolowicz danielw@theacorn.com

JANN HENDRY/Acorn Newspapers IT ALL ADDS UP-Medea Creek Math Team members, from left, Jinny Yoo, Nikki Toczauer, Alexandra Corley, Andrew Lerman, Takahiro Tanaka, Chelsea Toczauer, Dayton Martindale, Francesca Corley and teacher Brian Winsick, prepare for battle. The team is heading to Irvine this weekend to participate in the state level MATHCOUNTS competition.

What do you get when you take one team of eight middle school students and have them compete against nine other teams from two counties for a chance to take on some 20 other teams from across the state in order to vie for a national title against more than 200 of the top young mathematicians in the country?

It might sound like a complicated mathematical equation, but the answer is simple. It's MATHCOUNTS, an annual math competition that invites more than 500,000 "mathletes" from throughout Ventura Country to compete in the mathematician's version of a spelling bee.

For the third year in a row, Brian Winsick, a math teacher at Medea Creek Middle School in Oak Park, will take his team to compete against more than 20 other schools at the state competition in Irvine on March 18.

The eight-member Medea Creek team, comprised of four regulars and four alternate students, placed second out of 14 schools from Ventura and Santa Barbara counties in February.

Medea Creek student Andrew Lerman placed eighth overall in the individual competition.

If Winsick's team places fourth or better in the state competition, the students will go on to the national contest in Arlington, Va., in May. Winsick, who has entered teams into the MATHCOUNTS contest for the past eight years, said the competition gives him a chance to work with his seventhand eighth-graders on math problems they wouldn't ordinarily see in their regular math classes.

"I like the problems that they are working with and it gives us the opportunity to explore the things that we don't have time to explore in the regular curriculum," Winsick said.

Winsick said many of the students practice for the competition after school. Because much of the math tested in the contest is not part of the school's required curriculum, Winsick said he volunteers his time after school to help his team navigate complicated math problems that cover everything from geometry to statistics.

Started 22 years ago, MATHCOUNTS was founded by the National Society of Professional Engineers, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the CNA Financial Foundation.

Over the years, a who's who of companies from the science and high-tech industries sponsored the contest. The competition has grown so much that the finals are aired on ESPN, a programming companion to the annual National Spelling Bee Competition.

The program's goal is to promote math and engineering among younger students-much like those on Winsick's team.

Eighth-grader Alexandra Corley said she joined the team to help her improve on word problems. Like many of the other students, Corley said she really enjoys the competitive nature of the contest-especially winning.

"I was really excited about (winning) because we all worked hard over the course of the year and it paid off," Corley said.

Winsick said parental involvement is very important to running a successful program.

"I have some of an impact on the kids, but so much of it is the way they arrive at school, their parents and the influence their parents have and what they did at home," Winsick said.

The program seems to be working. "Nearly 80 percent of (MATHCOUNTS) alumni report a combined SAT score of 1,400 or above, and the top three college majors for alumni are engineering, mathematics and computer science," according to a survey conducted by MATHCOUNTS.

For some, though, it's not so much about the winning and losing, as it is about the math.

"I just like doing the math problems," said seventh-grader Takahiro Tanaka. "It does make you feel nervous . . . but it's kind of fun to do these problems . . . If I don't win, it still makes me feel really good."