Mathapalooza!

“…No matter gay, straight, or bi, lesbian, transgendered life, I’m on the right track, baby, I was born this way…” Lady GaGa’s anthem to individuality, also known as “Born This Way”, streamed through my semi-broken headphones as I hurtled through space from New York’s LaGuardia to Milwaukee’s General Mitchell airport. This weekend seemed like a blur. And it was a long weekend too. How did that happen?
Thursday was a whirlwind in and of itself – all of HLCS’s team was running around getting things set up for Mathapalooza, the inaugural math event at our school. There were balloons everywhere, string tangled around desks, streamers creatively hung from banisters, and plenty of sweating and stressing, but the event all came together in time. Unfortunately, I had a plane to catch, so I could only stay through the set up, but from what I understand, the school and CY MKE’s staff were very impressed with Mathapalooza and our team overall.
This is a huge step for our team I think, because we definitely came in as the underdog team. We’re the only team serving at a brand new partner school, so we’re facing frustrations the other teams aren’t in terms of getting teachers/admin to understand our role in MPS. Our school has been a SIFI (School Identified For Improvement) for at least 5 years. Mathapalooza, however, engaged over 100 students and parents, in addition to several teachers and school staff. Our principal couldn’t say enough good things – one of them being that any time we wanted to hold an event at HLCS, we had the green light, and that Mathapalooza was exactly the kind of event he imagined for his school.