“there is always a chance for failure and a chance for success but there won’t be a chance if you don’t try”
Pre workshop
SISMO is a math olympiad held and organised by SIS KG. Us mathletes decided that after several years of trying out math olympiads, we can start our own math olympiad. My senior was the first batch of SISMO organisers and since it was a success, we decided to continue their work and hold the second year (but first for online) SISMO.
As the Director of Curriculum (DoC) I, along with my other fellow DoC, was tasked to create the heart and soul of SISMO, the paper. Honestly when my beloved teacher, Mr. Kichan, assigned this role to me I was hesitant as everyone knows they remember a math olympiad mainly through the paper. If it was a bad paper, they will not return. This placed a lot of pressure on me and i was close to rejecting the role. However, I thought to myself, it would be cool if i can make a paper that would be remembered by many people. I also know that i would never succeed if i never try so i thought that I would give it a shot. And i did. (Unfortunately this is all done online so theres not much pictures. Pls bear with it 😦 )
For my male viewers out there who went through school surely can relate to group projects with that one very hard working girl in your grade. She will make you work really hard even when you don’t want to :(. Unfortunately part of the DoC is that hard working girl and my winter holiday disappeared because of that but hey, at least all the questions were done when we came back to school.
My experience as a DoC is pretty dull as all i did was think of a question and write it down on the google docs. Thats pretty much all the three of us did until the start of school. However, the challenging part of being a DoC is that after you finished making the questions, you have to compile the paper.
Part of our job as a DoC is that we have to teach our junior mathletes the ways of math olympiad. Every week we prepare a short paper for them to do. This is also a chance for us DoC to learn the platform we’re going to be using, Ylearn (since we DoC are going to be marking). We would go through past papers in WMI to compile a short 6 question paper for the junior mathletes and after every session, we would have to explain the problems we assigned. This means i can only choose the questions i am capable of doing which is the limiting factor for this exercise. It also doesn’t help that i can only pick those from WMI making the questions I can choose limited. Though i try not to use used questions from previous trials, there may be a day where I do.
Post workshop
We held a total of 3 zoom session with the participants. A workshop, technical meeting and the actual SISMO day. The workshop is a day where we teach some of the curriculum to the participants such as Vietta’s formula or Heron’s formula. As part of the DoC, it was my job to lead and run the Intermediate/Advanced workshop along with my brother, Raynald. He was in charge of most of the workshop as he was to be a featured guest and i am to support him but when the workshop was about to end, he suddenly, had urgent business to attend to and i had to take over. The problem is I didn’t expect to fully take over the meeting so i didn’t prepare much material and when discussing the switch, My brother didn’t mute. That was embarrassing ._.
Even without much preparation material, I still managed to pull it off and the workshop went smoothly (aside from that previous blunder). With that i hoped the students learnt something new to take to the SISMO day.
The week after the workshop, was the technical meeting. This is where we discuss the rules and regulation for the actual SISMO day. You’d think as a DoC i would just sit there and look pretty but the committee decided it would be a good idea to make the DoC to read the Indonesian part of the script. I don’t mind reading the Indonesian part of the script but I don’t take pride in my formal Indo speaking skills. I take pride in my informal Indo speaking skills. Whats more is that my partner who reads the english part of the script printed her part before we finished editing the script. Though it’s not her fault :p. Problem is i cannot translate on the fly just like that since if i just read the script the english part and Indo part will be different. I just pray that the participants didn’t notice the weird choices of words.
Finally the week after the technical meeting was the actual SISMO day. I was once again in charge of the Indonesian translation part of the script but thankfully this time, the english and Indo part is the same. Oddly enough, even though we held a very detailed technical meeting and gave out a very detailed handbook that the whole committee worked on for WEEKS, some of the participants still doesn’t follow our simple instructions of angling the camera or having two devices for SISMO. We unfortunately had to disqualify them. Funny thing is one of the disqualified participant kept complaining that he didn’t know about the rules when he joined the technical meeting AND have been bothering the coordinators with a lot questions.
After the open ended paper, I had to mark all the junior papers. It was very painful having to juggle monitor the ylearn platform and marking at the same time. Luckily i had help from the other members of the committee so the marking process went smoothly.
After all the results are out, we moved on to the lightning round. As the DoC of the Junior category, I was tasked to run and host the lightning round. The introduction and explanation went so smoothly i was wondering whether they get it or not but i knew they understood what i meant since they managed to answer all the questions in less than a minute. They answered so fast some of the committee members didn’t even finished reading the question when the participant answered. Not only that, the Junior lightning round was finished even before Intermediate or Advanced even started their questioning.
Meetings
Though this section is not in chronological order with the other 2 sections, this category still needed to be its own section as theres quite a story to tell.
Our meeting are actually really painful :’). If we are lucky we would be done before 12 midnight and if not it would be AM when we are done. These long and painful hours are the reason why SISMO takes up most of my time ywy.
It’s in these meetings that we get our job distribution. Though my official title is DoC, I feel like i could pass off as chairperson assistant. We DoC were tasked with not only the papers but also with script editing with the coordinators, translating for the Indonesian part of the script and assisting the director of logistics with the platform issues. Though we DoC handles a lot of little parts of the other departments, we still had to handle the DoC part of our jobs. I’m just glad we only had to help out with small miscellaneous work. This means everyone is doing their main jobs well enough that the event can run smoothly. After all when you are part of a team you gotta help each other out right? :p
IB Learner Profile
Reflective: After having our mistakes pointed out by my heads about the paper, i reflected on what i did wrong in order to come up with a solution and fix my mistakes.
Courageous: Even though I was hesitant to take up the job that was given to me in the beginning, i built up some courage to take up the offer and become one of the DoC.
Communicators: One of the many joys of working in a group is that we get to communicate all the needs and issues we have with each other. Especially with my fellow DoC.
Caring: We as DoC knows that most of the people who joins SISMO are those who have not joined SISMO before as we advertise ourselves as an introductory math olympiad. We DoC stay caring and decided to make this SISMO easier even though the dark side of our personality wants to make it harder.
Thinkers: We DoC spent our whole winter holiday just thinking about SISMO questions to add to the final paper.
Thanks for reading my blog. I hope my fellow readers will want to join SISMO next year 😉
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