A home educated boy, Sean van Wyk was selected to be part of team of 4 Grade 7 learners to attend the International Mathematics Competition (IMC) – South Korea 2014. He has never attended school.
[The IMC is an annual event intended to motivate teachers and learners to improve the teaching and learning of mathematics and higher-order thinkings skills as well as establish networks for international co-operation. There is more information as well as past papers at http://www.imc-official.org/
Here is Sean’s story:
“Sean has always loved math and from a young age, we discovered that he was easily bored by various math programs, as they did not challenge him. He was also regularly trying to solve math challenges. In Grade 4 he started participating in the annual AMESA Math Challenge and always did extremely well surprising the headmaster at the local school – after all he was home educated.
Last year a fellow home school dad in Durbanville got to hear about the Horizon Math Competition (http://www.hmc.
We started trolling the Internet to try and find out more information about this international competition that everyone was speaking about and contacted the overseas organiser who put us in touch with the teacher in charge at Elkanah House.
On 12 February 2014, Sean wrote the first round exam (75min) at the school with 258 learners from around the Western Cape and then he was invited to the second round on 27 February along with 37 other learners for a 2 hour exam. We worked through 2 past papers and found them very challenging. After the exam he was absolutely exhausted and said it was tough but he thought he had done OK. Yesterday morning we got a call from the school congratulating us on his selection to travel to South Korea (4 children were chosen for South Korea and 4 children in Grade 7 were chosen to travel to Hong Kong for another international math competition.)
He loves math and has also excelled in it and especially after last year’s achievement at Horizon we were not totally surprised by his selection.
There is a one Grade 7 and one Grade 10 team going to the competition from Cape Town and the rest of South Africa will either send one or two additional teams. Elkanah House in Sunningdale co-ordinate the teams from Cape Town. The team members have to attend weekly training from 10 March until departure in July, this includes school holidays during which additional training days will also be held.”
Submitted by Fiona van Wyk
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