AAAS staff members thank STEM teachers who have influenced their lives during Teacher Appreciation Week.

A small, elite team of four mathematicians from U.S. high schools will participate in the Mexican Mathematical Olympiad beginning Monday 12 November in the city of Guanajuato.

The intensive competition will span two days, with results announced on Friday 16 November. The students were selected for the team based on their skills in math and Spanish after an intensive 10-day special training program in August organized by AAAS.

The four members of the AAAS team are:

Evelyn Lamb wrote an ode to the importance of algebra during her AAAS fellowship with Scientific American. Meeri Kim reported on advances in preventing blindness, which prompted an older reader of the Philadelphia Inquirer to seek medical care that reportedly saved her vision. Jon Bardin contributed to Los Angeles Times coverage of NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover landing. Ian C. Campbell ventured waist-deep into a river for an Oregonian story about a Native American harvest of eel-like creatures called lamprey.

The Internet has profoundly disrupted the traditional role of teacher as dispenser of information, and during a recent workshop at AAAS, educators, researchers, and industry representatives sought to transcend old views and help teaching methods catch up with the technology.