vRusczyk, MCrawford and I went to the Southern California Math teachers convention this weekend. I'm looking forward to going back sometime in the future when we have more of our books finished. As you might guess, there wasn't much interest in materials for the top students. We are, however, learning how to refine our pitch to teachers. We have a way to go, but we're getting closer.

We spent a fair amount of time talking with Richard Kalman, the Executive Director of MOEMS. He's among that small set of people who have been in education for a long time and are still having fresh ideas. Although he'd likely disagree with me, I wager a lot of MOEMS continued success is due to his energy and vision.

One of the strangest things I think we encountered were a handful of people who came to us basically looking for materials to prepare for the AMC/AIME tests, yet we couldn't quite make them see that AoPS is what it is -- the central resource for exactly this. We need to get better at our 2-minute sales pitch in this regard. We also need to get better at reading people in 1 minute and figuring out which approach we should take in explaining that our material is right for them, if in fact our material is good for them. MCrawford pointed out we need 3-5 well-refined pitches for different purposes.

Anyway, I hope we can do a booth at National MATHCOUNTS. That will be much easier .

Now back to writing, and editing .