For all four years of high school, I spent an afternoon a month workiing out some pretty difficult math problems at schools all across Eastern Maine. Of course, now with calculus off of my interest list, I would’ve thought going back to the math team would’ve been one of the things pretty low on my ToDo list. That was my thought until today, however.
I happened to see one of the UMaine event directional signs pointing towards Alfond Arena while I was walking to COM 103. It didn’t take me long to remember that the state meet is always held on one of the first Wednesdays in April, and one of the possible yearly locations is Alfond. After psych, I decided to check in on my old buddies.
I walked into Alfond just as they were reading the answers to the final individual round, right before the lunch break. Everything was the same… the sighs and cheers every time an answer was read and the hundreds of tables with math students huddled around them on the Alfond floor. I couldn’t help but laugh (and be thankful I was done with it). After everyone started to leave for lunch, I went down on the floor and caught up with Miss Lynch and the good ol’ HAMT. It’s a good team, and they were in second in their division after two rounds. I talked with most of them about how their years were going, where they were going to college, and the normal stuff. I talked to Andrea Palmer for a while about what she was doing and how I was doing at UMaine. I was also glad to hear that Mike, Ben, and Sam are all either thinking or have decided to come to Maine. It brought me back to my senior year: all the decisions, all the APs. We talked about stupid mistakes, we talked about calcluator games (including on my now-legal TI-89, even though it’s now only allowed on the team round, something I couldn’t’ve standed). I was glad to talk with Miss Lynch and Mr. Worthley about their years and about how I was doing.
As far as the math went, I looked through some scrap paper and saw the same old kinds of problems. I was also both amazed and very pleased to hear and see that the freshmen–yes, the freshmen–on the team were scoring 30 and 40 points, compared to the top scorers on the team with about 50. The tradition continues.
And the Class of 2001 can definitely say they had an impact on EMML: one of the non-creative teams felt that they should copy our t-shirt idea about non-integer numbers {sqrt(2), infinity, pi, -0, etc.}. Oh, well, imitation is the highest form of flattery, I guess. 🙂