Montgomery County is no longer going to fund the county’s participation in ARML, the American Regions Mathematics League. (Funny name, right? In my day, young whippersnappers, it was the “Atlantic Region Mathematics League,” and stopped at Chicago. By the time the rest of the country got in on the competition, the acronym was too well-branded to change. Nowadays, teams from Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Phillipines, and Colombia compete. “All-Encompassing Regional Mathematics League?”)
Montgomery County has been sending a team to ARML since the very first meet in 1976. These days, they send four full teams of 15 students each, plus a separate team of middle-schoolers. So all kinds of kids come, not just the child prodigies and the math obsessives — which is a terrific feature of the “mathletic” culture that our coach, Eric Walstein, has built up over the last thirty years. It would be a shame to see the county ARML team disappear, or radically contract to the 15 superstars only.
I don’t understand the intricacies of school funding well enough to complain knowledgably about Montgomery County’s decision (but feel free to do so in comments!) I think the idea is that MCPS expects the math team to have alumni and friends who can afford to help out with a little money. If you’re one of them, you can send a check made out to “Blair Math Team” to
Eric Walstein
Montgomery Blair High School
51 University Blvd – east
Silver Spring, MD 20901
Please do not write “TNYWR” for the amount.
Quomodocumque 