Burnout
by rrusczyk, Jun 17, 2006, 3:21 PM
Probably many of you have had the following happen to you:
You get really into something (in the case of this site, probably math). You study, you work, you study some more. You learn tons. Your test results go way up. You start placing or even winning contests. It's exciting, so you start studying more. Then after a few weeks or a few months, your test results start going down. You stop doing as well in math contests. You react by working even harder, but everything just gets worse.
If this has happened, or is happening to you, you're burning out. The solution is not to study more - it's to study less. Go exercise. Do something fun (don't just go study something else!). It will be hard at first to let go - you'll be afraid that if you study less, people will pass you. But if you keep at it when burning out, they'll pass you anyway. Back off, chill out, and you'll be back to your old self fairly quickly.
This recommendation comes, as you might guess, from personal experience. By my senior year, math contests were simply no fun any more, primarily because the expectations (mostly my own) were 'first or failure'. In that case, it's just not fun any more. I reacted by skipping most of the local and state contests which were unimportant. I even missed the state championship contest I had won the year before. But I had my best results ever on the AIME (first) and the USAMO (4th), and I largely ascribe that to simply chilling out. I went into both exams not really thinking about the implications of either - I was taking them for fun.
While I faced this problem in high school, many MATHCOUNTS students hit this in middle school. There it can be even worse - the students are stuck studying math which is no longer challenging to them, and they feel the pressure to keep training with trivial mathematics, to get faster, to memorize every MATHCOUNTS question ever written. This is a poisonous approach to preparation. When you get to this point with MATHCOUNTS, there's one thing you must do - MOVE ON.
MATHCOUNTS is a wonderful starting point, but some students are ready to move past it in 7th or 8th (or even 6th) grade. And when you're ready to move on to harder problem solving, you should. (You'll find that your MATHCOUNTS skills won't suffer, either - as you get into more mature problem solving math, you'll learn all sorts of approaches that trivialize MATHCOUNTS problems and help you catch silly mistakes.)
So, you've qualified for the AIME in 8th grade and have the state MATHCOUNTS contest coming up? Work on old AIMEs, or tests like the Harvard/MIT tests. Don't work tons of MATHCOUNTS problems - they'll probably make you hate MATHCOUNTS, which would be a shame, and you'll learn much less.
The goals in these contests are to learn, have fun, and meet cool people. Focus on these, and the winning will come naturally. Once it stops being interesting and fun, then it becomes a job. And who wants a job?
You get really into something (in the case of this site, probably math). You study, you work, you study some more. You learn tons. Your test results go way up. You start placing or even winning contests. It's exciting, so you start studying more. Then after a few weeks or a few months, your test results start going down. You stop doing as well in math contests. You react by working even harder, but everything just gets worse.
If this has happened, or is happening to you, you're burning out. The solution is not to study more - it's to study less. Go exercise. Do something fun (don't just go study something else!). It will be hard at first to let go - you'll be afraid that if you study less, people will pass you. But if you keep at it when burning out, they'll pass you anyway. Back off, chill out, and you'll be back to your old self fairly quickly.
This recommendation comes, as you might guess, from personal experience. By my senior year, math contests were simply no fun any more, primarily because the expectations (mostly my own) were 'first or failure'. In that case, it's just not fun any more. I reacted by skipping most of the local and state contests which were unimportant. I even missed the state championship contest I had won the year before. But I had my best results ever on the AIME (first) and the USAMO (4th), and I largely ascribe that to simply chilling out. I went into both exams not really thinking about the implications of either - I was taking them for fun.
While I faced this problem in high school, many MATHCOUNTS students hit this in middle school. There it can be even worse - the students are stuck studying math which is no longer challenging to them, and they feel the pressure to keep training with trivial mathematics, to get faster, to memorize every MATHCOUNTS question ever written. This is a poisonous approach to preparation. When you get to this point with MATHCOUNTS, there's one thing you must do - MOVE ON.
MATHCOUNTS is a wonderful starting point, but some students are ready to move past it in 7th or 8th (or even 6th) grade. And when you're ready to move on to harder problem solving, you should. (You'll find that your MATHCOUNTS skills won't suffer, either - as you get into more mature problem solving math, you'll learn all sorts of approaches that trivialize MATHCOUNTS problems and help you catch silly mistakes.)
So, you've qualified for the AIME in 8th grade and have the state MATHCOUNTS contest coming up? Work on old AIMEs, or tests like the Harvard/MIT tests. Don't work tons of MATHCOUNTS problems - they'll probably make you hate MATHCOUNTS, which would be a shame, and you'll learn much less.
The goals in these contests are to learn, have fun, and meet cool people. Focus on these, and the winning will come naturally. Once it stops being interesting and fun, then it becomes a job. And who wants a job?
February 2012
January 2012