How am I supposed to go back to watching the goofy NBA finals after this weekend of tennis 😭😩.

RT @BowTiedFox: if you want to see a glaring divide in class, this essay is a perfect example. look at all the nerds in the replies saying,….

I like to show this to the high school students at the math camp I teach at. Not getting into MIT/Harvard isn't the end of the world, and in fact it might be better for your long term success. Link to full video.

With all the discourse around college admissions and high schoolers with cracked stats getting rejected everywhere, I'm reminded of Gladwell's argument that instead of going to Harvard, you should go somewhere you can stand out and be top of your class.

RT @JessicaBRiedl: The "Lock up Hillary" Republicans shrugging off signal-gate is another reminder that most current politicians care only….

RT @David_J_Bier: The evil is bottomless. The US granted permanent refugee status to several Venezuelans facing persecution abroad only to….

RT @RichardHanania: Why can't they just accept what happened and move on? . Look, if you have real criticisms of the media and think it has….

And high level math is not something that we should hide behind a paywall. I hope the next CEO will truly prioritize making AoPS more accessible to students from underserved communities, because it really is a fantastic resource. 17/17.

It felt like there would never be another self-taught, homegrown kid to rise through the math competition circuit, just like there are barely any top high school basketball players whose parents haven't spent a fortune on AAU tournaments and private coaches and camps 16/.

I asked what grade he was in and he said he was in 4th grade, but that his mom makes him take WOOT, a course designed for juniors and seniors with hopes of making the International Math Olympiad. At that moment, I knew that I was helping to make the problem worse 15/.

I remember as a sophomore in college I worked for AoPS online as a course assistant for WOOT (and other courses). It paid well and I def needed money. But one day in WOOT after helping a student with a problem in our private chat, he admitted he just wanted to go outside 14/.

This discourages many students, particularly those who lacked access to resources like AoPS, from pursuing mathematics, or from doing as well as they could have. Even the engineering and CS kids are casual 3x AIME qualifiers and breezing through their intro courses 13/.

Not only are you at an academic disadvantage, but you're at a social one as well. Many of your classmates have already been online friends for years on AoPS, and form pset groups together, and if you do pset with them you quickly feel like you actually don't know any math 12/.

As math competitions got harder, and the students taking them became more advanced, so did the math courses at the schools admitting these students. Try being a math major at MIT or Harvard whose never heard of these competitions or AoPS before. 11/.

In fact, I remember each year AoPS would post stats like "11 of the 12 highest scorers on the USAMO that year collectively took over 50 AoPS courses". That's over $2,500 per kid. It would seem impossible to be successful without paying for these courses 10/.

It seemed with the rise of AoPS it was becoming increasingly less likely for a "regular" kid who is the top math student at their school to do well on these competitions without knowing about AoPS 9/.

But was AoPS turning competition math or advanced math skills more generally, into a pay-to-win platform? We've seen this "pay-to-win" idea in other areas like AAU basketball or expensive card games like Magic The Gathering or Yugioh 8/.

Undoubtedly, the math instruction I got from the course was amazing, and my proof writing skills and mathematical maturity significantly improved. I loved it, and the stuff I learned that year definitely made my first semester of math in college feel like a breeze. 7/.

They weren't allowed to share me the materials and I remember going home and finding out that this WOOT (Worldwide Online Olympiad Training) course costs $700 (in 2015 dollars). My mom couldn't afford it, so that summer I saved up my money from my summer job and signed up 6/.

It was 2014 or 2015, my junior year. I was just hanging out in my "Honors Advanced Math", when I noticed two of my (younger) classmates working on handouts I didn't recognize that looked really advanced. They told me it was from their WOOT class.5/.