F=math

In my sophomore year of high school, I started F=math, a week-long summer math camp for middle school students in the Dallas Fort-Worth area. We later expanded to online classes and seminars, impacting over 300 students and raising over $5000 to charity. It was my first substantial teaching and organizational experience, and I'm incredibly grateful to all of my fellow teachers for sticking with me through it all. I wrote a memoir about my experience and learnings, although names and some events are fictional for privacy.

All the other mathletes at Little Kevin's competitions knew each other from IDEA MATH. I couldn't afford IDEA MATH. Instead, I spent late nights alone, filling knowledge gaps with online forum solutions.

I wanted to make competition math accessible, so I founded F=math, a summer math camp. All my math contacts and a dozen venues declined to help until a non-profit kindly provided space. Relieved, I started rehearsing my twenty lectures. Everything was going perfectly. 

When camp began, passing handouts quickly became dodging handout-turned-paper airplanes. It was hard, but I kept up appearances until, during a lecture:

Why isn't 2x here?

Suddenly, my heartbeat suffocated from the pressure. My bored students folded more airplanes. 

I was obsessed with becoming the perfect teacher. But perfect teachers aren't textbooks; they focus on students' needs.

So, I turned Daniel's airplanes into 3D geometry lessons. I reassured Alice, who ate lunch alone, that older kids wouldn't belittle her. When Kyle hid my markers, I enlisted his help brainstorming engaging break activities. I drew circles that implied pi=4 and finished last in Kyle's chess tournament, but that didn't matter. I'm trying to build a love for problem-solving, and the perfect thing to do is struggle and improve.

And maybe I did more. Watching students huddled over "The Impossible Problem," I saw the math community Little Kevin dreamed of—that Older Kevin helped create.