Sometimes people ask me how many of my students made the IMO, and if I’m in a bad mood I often give the super snarky reply, “I lost track”.1 That’s actually a white lie. The real answer is “I deliberately don’t keep track”. And in this post I want to explain why. It’s definitely human… Continue reading Pride
Tag: teaching
New handout: Intro to Proofs for the Morbidly Curious
Downloadable at https://web.evanchen.cc/handouts/NaturalProof/NaturalProof.pdf. I don't know why I thought to write this, but it's been bugging me for a year or two now that I've never seen the answer to "what is a proof" written out quite this way. So here you go. It's a bit weird for me to be writing an article that… Continue reading New handout: Intro to Proofs for the Morbidly Curious
The silver lining
A while ago someone asked me how COVID had affected the students I worked with. I replied that, on average, the pandemic had tripled my students' productivity. And I'm gonna brag about it like the proud teacher I am.
Sometimes the best advice is no advice
信言不美，美言不信。 I get a lot of questions that are so general that there is no useful answer I can give, e.g., "how do I get better at geometry?". What do you want from me? Go do more problems, sheesh. These days, in my instructions for contacting me, I tell people to be as specific as… Continue reading Sometimes the best advice is no advice
OTIS: The RPG
I went and took the idea in I switched to point-based problem sets one step further this year. Now the OTIS-WEB page looks like this: Makes it feel a bit more rewarding to complete problem sets, I think. Also gives me the chance to plant easter eggs everywhere, which is always a lot of fun… Continue reading OTIS: The RPG
Book pitch
This is a pitch for a new text that I'm thinking of writing. I want to post it here to solicit opinions from the general community before investing a lot of time into the actual writing. Summary There are a lot of students who ask me a question isomorphic to: How do I learn to… Continue reading Book pitch
On choosing exercises
Finally, if you attempt to read this without working through a significant number of exercises (see §0.0.1), I will come to your house and pummel you with [Gr-EGA] until you beg for mercy. It is important to not just have a vague sense of what is true, but to be able to actually get your… Continue reading On choosing exercises
Meritocracy is the worst form of admissions except for all the other ones
I'm now going to say something explicitly that I hinted at in June: I don't think a student deserves to make MOP more because they had a higher score than another student. I think it's easy to get this impression because the selection for MOP is done by score cutoffs. So it sure looks that… Continue reading Meritocracy is the worst form of admissions except for all the other ones
Understanding with System 1
Math must be presented for System 1 to absorb and only incidentally for System 2 to verify. I finally have a sort-of formalizable guideline for teaching and writing math, and what it means to "understand" math. I've been unconsciously following this for years and only now managed to write down explicitly what it is that… Continue reading Understanding with System 1
MOP should do a better job of supporting its students in not-June
Up to now I always felt a little saddened when I see people drop out of the IMO or EGMO team selection. But actually, really I should be asking myself what I (as a coach) could do better to make sure the students know we value their effort, even if they ultimately don't make the… Continue reading MOP should do a better job of supporting its students in not-June
Power Overwhelming 