Scott Kellert

The Passion of the Mathlete

            I always knew that I was good at math, but I never really thought that it would lead me somewhere important.  My teacher was Ms. Bechtel and we had just gotten back our latest math test.  I was happy to see that I had gotten yet another perfect score.  As I headed out the door to go play kickball, Ms. Bechtel called me back.  She said that I should join the math club when I go to the upper school.  I thought that it was the last thing I would ever want to do, and as I left I didn’t think for a second that I would actually join.  Unfortunately, Ms. Bechtel was one step ahead of me, at parent teacher conferences she had told my parents her idea, and now they were excited at the concept.

*          *          *

            Someone is yelling my name.  I don’t want to wake up, so I roll over pretending to get up then return to my peaceful state of sleep.  Someone calls my name again.  I groan.  Then I realize that I have to wake up early today because it is the first meeting of the math club.  It is 6:30 on a Wednesday morning.  I don’t think I have ever woken up when it is still this dark outside.  I finally roll out of bed, and try to start gathering my books for school and putting clothes on.  My dad has agreed to buy me a chocolate croissant in exchange for waking up this early to go to math club.  The whole drive I want to slip back into whatever great dream I was having before I was rudely awakened.  Finally we reach Black Pine Circle School, I get out of the car and walk up the stairs to Mr. Gulimovskiy’s room.  I see some of my fellow classmates in similar poor moods and I sit in one of the desks in the back of the room.

            Mr. Gulimovskiy is a man as strange as his name.  Although he was fairly short and only a little chubby, he always seemed massive to me.  You can count on him to be wearing a button down plaid shirt, khaki pants, and oversized glasses every day of the year.  He has short brown hair.  His most notable feature in my mind is his teeth.  It always seemed as though he had far too many, and they were all trying to squeeze into his gums but couldn’t quite fit.  And you can tell he never brushed his teeth by the distinct yellowish color all his teeth share, and the stench of his open mouth near your face.

            “Greetings class,” Mr. G says enthusiastically, in that oh so familiar Ukrainian accent, as the clock hits 7:30.  “I hope you all remembered to bring two sharpened pencils and graph paper.”  This philosophy would be the source of many feuds over the years.

            “Let me tell you a story about a little boy named Carl Friedrich Gauss.  One day his teacher decided that she did not want to teach the class, so she told the class to add up all the numbers from 1 to 100.  One minute later Gauss raised his hand and said he had the answer, it was 5050.  And this is how Gauss created the formula for solving arithmetic series…”  Mr. G excitedly paced from one end of the room to the other, going on and on about term one, term n, and mostly terms that made no sense to me.  What had I gotten myself into?  As his ramblings went on I noticed that Adam had drifted into sleep, a place I sorely wanted to be.

            “Adam!” with Mr. G’s shout, Adam seemed to launch out of his seat. “You are in la la land, Adam” Adam appeared confused.  “You are in the clouds, get out of the clouds the clouds the clouds.”  Adam still seemed somewhat oblivious to the situation, while Mr. G sounded like he was leading a native Ukrainian chant.  With Adam’s lack of a response, Mr. G grabbed his backpack, or as Mr. G would say “packback”, and threw it out the window of our second story class room.  This was the first act of many that caused me to dislike Mr. G and his unusual tactics.

            Those long Wednesday mornings made me miserable.  Every Tuesday night I would beg my dad to let me skip math club, but not once did I succeed.  After I finished sixth grade, I got moved up from math club to math team, but things remained the same as they had always been.  I just had to be there longer.  The math team met every Wednesday for two hours after school.  We supposedly got a fifteen minute break every day but after five minutes of basketball Mr. G would always call us in.  Week after week would spend hours memorizing strange formulas that allowed you to solve seemingly impossible problems.  During the winter of that year I noticed my first real reason to be grateful for Mr. G’s strange and sometimes scary teaching tactics.  We took the California Mathematics Competition test.  It was forty multiple choice questions, and question after question I found the answer easily.  When we got the results back I found that I had gotten the highest score the entire class.  Then Mr. G told me that I had come in second place in the whole east bay, and that it was online.  The website that says my name and shows my score is still one of my greatest accomplishments to date.  I know that Mr. G is solely responsible for getting me this accomplishment.  Although I never thought about it at the time, I was truly lucky to have such a great teacher.

The next big test after CMC is the Mathcounts competition.  It is the most difficult competition that BPC participates in.  When we got the results back, I was heart broken when I found that I had gotten ninth place in the school.  For this competition only the top eight move on to the next round.  After my success on CMC I knew I had the potential to get to that next level.  Despite hating our study sessions and all the work Mr. G gives us, I loved the thrill of the competition.  And now that I had won something, I wanted to win it all next year.

            When the year started, I decided to take a stand against the tyranny that was Mr. G’s two hour long study sessions after school.  I realized that I already knew all of the skills to succeed; I just needed to do a few practice problems a week to keep me fresh.  As I feared, when Mr. G saw that I was not signed up for the math team, he was furious.  He came storming up to me one day at lunch.  After much convincing, and promising to do fifty problems a week independently, and lying about how I don’t have time in my schedule, and saying that I really do want to come I just can’t, he agreed to the deal.  I thought I was in the clear.  I was wrong.

            Mr. G had been planning away and devised this masterful scheme, a new seating arrangement and curriculum for certain students.  I was put at a table that was at the side of the room with Marin, Nathan, and Willy.  In stead of learning algebra and geometry like the rest of the class, we learned how to add all the powers of 3 from 1 to 3^999 and how to tell if 42967221 is divisible by 11 without using your calculator, you know useful stuff.

            Mr. G was giving us problems for each specific competition as they came, but in back of my head I knew I was only really training for one of them.  I knew all the extra work I was putting in was paying off, because I was placed in the honor roll globally for one competition and my team set a record at another.

As February approached nothing lay ahead of me except for Mathcounts and this time I felt more prepared than ever before.  Mr. G was working us so hard, I felt like my head was about to explode anytime I even thought about math.  He gave us 120 problems to do over winter break.

*          *          *

            I never get nervous, but on the big day I couldn’t help but feel some anxiety.  I went through formula after formula in my head.  A one times the ratio raised to the n power minus one all over n.  Is that sum or is it term n?  But I had to forget about all that as the tests were handed out.  I thought to myself, alright this is the moment of truth, and I put my pencil to the paper, and off I went.  I cruised through the test without much difficulty.  The last five problems are always impossible but I think I managed to get a few of them.  I had finished the test and all I could do now is wait.

            Over the next week my heart pounded just a little bit faster as I walked in the math room in anticipation of receiving the score that would allow me to move on to the next round.  Finally, one week after the test, Mr. G had the results.  He went from desk to desk handing out tests as he went.  I saw many people look at their test and shrug at their poor scores as if to say that the test did not matter.  They did not realize what lay on the line for some of the people in the room.  After what seemed like an eternity Mr. G came to my desk grinning with those disgusting yellow teeth of his.  When I saw the test I let out a scream of “YES” at the 26/30 at the top of the paper.  This was a stellar score for this test, but there was still a great deal of anxiety because I still didn’t know where I had ranked within the school.  Mr. G said he would post the top scores on the wall during lunch.  As I played hand ball, I couldn’t stay on top of my game knowing the results could come any minute.  Then, as I laid down a mega slam, I saw Mr. G putting the paper up on the wall.  I left the game without hesitation and ran over.  There it was, what I had been working for this whole year.  #5: Scott Kellert.  I made it.

            With all of my efforts going into making regionals the whole year, I hadn’t even thought about what going to them was like.  I learned from Mr. G later that day that there was an A team and a B team, and that only the A team would be in contention for moving onto the state competition.  The teams were composed of four mathletes, and as it stood right now I was the fifth ranked person in the school.  Mr. G told me he had not made a final decision about the teams yet, and that they would not necessarily be decided based on the rankings.  So I kept hope that he would put me on the A team, after all that hard work I had done.

            The regional competition was in two weeks and Mr. G was working us harder than ever.  I wanted the A spot so badly, and I was doing everything I could to prove myself.  But as time passed it became apparent to me that Mr. G would select my nemesis Dylan Mattingly over me.  Whenever we did practice team tests I was almost always put on the practice B team.  This decision crushed me.  I knew I could do better than him, but I could not get Mr. G to see it that way.  I kept hope that he might change his mind.

            The competition was on a Saturday and started at 8:00 a.m. but Mr. G wanted us there at seven.  It was still dark when my alarm went off that morning.  I grabbed a bagel for breakfast and my dad drove me down to the Cal campus where the contest would take place.  I met up with my fellow BPC teammates, and Mr. G listed the official A and B teams.  Like I expected, I was placed on the B team.

            I was on a team full of losers, people who hadn’t worked nearly as hard as I had to be here.  I was furious.  But, I had committed myself to proving Mr. G wrong, so I put aside my feelings, and still tried to do my best.  After a half hour of pointless instructions the individual test began.  I went through the problems with ease.  Every answer I put was the reason I should have been on the A team.  Then the group test came, and our rag tag group of B teamers pulled it together quite well.  I was happy with what I had just finished and now, once again, had to wait to see if it paid off.

            After two hours of waiting, Mr. G came over to us and told us that the results were about to be posted.  We all hurried over to the hallway outside the grading room.  As the door swung open my heart began to beat at an alarming rate.  The man who walked out had two pieces of paper in his hands.  I tried to catch glimpses of what they said but there were too many people.  Once the papers made their way to the wall, there were so many people in front of me I couldn’t see a thing.  I was up on my toes trying to catch a glimpse when I heard the familiar voice of Marin “Scott, Nathan!” he was close enough to the paper.

            “What, how’d I do!?”  Then I finally saw it.  #12:  Scott Kellert.  #16: Nathan Glendenning.  I had done it.  Nathan was on the A team and I had outscored him.  Even though the A team had gotten second place and could go to the state championship and I couldn’t, I had proven myself the worthy one and that was all that mattered.  It didn’t matter that I had beaten Nathan specifically, only that I really was worthy to be at the A team level.

            Well, that was all that mattered until I was told anyone ranked 16^th or higher moved onto the head to head challenge round.  With my rank at twelve, I would have to face number 5.  All I knew was that he was some Asian kid from Diablo Middle School.  He was on the team that had gotten first place in the East Bay.  Now it was time to really show Mr. G the mistake he had made.

            I entered the class room, but for me, the arena. At the front of the room there were two desks separated by a projector.  There were more than a hundred people crammed into the desks of this classroom, and they were all going to be watching me.  I was not up first so I took a seat with the rest of the BPC team in the audience.  The first two combatants stepped up towards the front of the room.  They each took a seat, were explained the rules, then the battle began. It was best two out of three, so getting the first problem seemed crucial.  And quickly the fight was over and someone had come out victorious.  Over the next few rounds I saw many of my BPC comrades fall, and I was beginning to worry that I might as well.  Finally, they called my name.  My heart was pounding as I walked to the desk on the left.  My desk had a child’s noise maker that looked like a plastic stick with two hands at the top.  The guy that sat next to me was equipped with a morocca.

            “You will have forty five seconds to answer each of the following questions.   The first person to buzz, or in our case shake in will get the point if they are right.  If they are wrong the other person will have the remainder of the time to answer the question.  Mathletes, ready?”

            “Ready” I mutter just wishing he would show the problem already.

            “Question 1:  How many zeros are at the end of the product of 5347290 and 4398670?”  Both me and my enemy draw our pencils and go to work.  I don’t really know what to do here.  There are already two zeros so there have to be two.  I hear the sound of a morocca and my heart comes to a stop.  Am I already losing?          

“One” he said seeming sure of himself.  Fool, I thought.

            “Incorrect.”  Now I had the whole forty-five seconds to find the answer, but I didn’t really know what to do.  I decided two must be the answer.  I shook my clapper.

            “Two?”

            “Incorrect,” the judge said again.  I had blown my moment of opportunity to get in the first blow.  “Next question.  There is a circle circumscribed in this square and a square circumscribed in that circle.  If the larger square has an area of 9 what is the area of the smaller square?”  What is this I thought.  My opponent was already frantically jotting down notes, and before I could really figure out anything I heard the deadly shaking of that maraca again.  He had beaten me to the punch again, and I could feel it in my chest.

            “Four point five.”

            “Correct.”  And like that I was behind.  I need to get the next two questions.  “Next question.  What is the quotient of nine raised to 999,999 divided by three raised to 999,999.”  I know this.  Each power adds a factor of three.  I swing my clapper, and I can see that terrified look that I must have had in the eyes of my foe.

            “Three raised to the 999,999^th power.”  I stated with confidence.

            “Correct.”  I was back in this.  There was only one question left, for all the marbles.  “Final question.  There are seven students in a class, and they want to sit around a circular table.  How many ways can they arrange themselves?”  This was permutations.  I have known this since sixth grade.  Because it is a circle though it doesn’t matter where the first person sits.  The answer is six factorial.  The answer is 120.  As I grabbed my clapper and raised it to the sky, vigorously shaking my hand, joy filled my body.

            “120,” I said with a smile on my face.

            “That is correct, you are the winner.”  I went over to my opponent and shook his hand, acknowledging the good fight.  Then I ran over to my teammates.  I was ecstatic.  But most importantly Mr. G was proud.  In the next round of the competition I lost.  I didn’t win an award like many of my other teammates, but I still felt I was among the most accomplished students there.

*          *          *

            After middle school I no longer participated in math competitions.  I think that it is mostly because I knew I could never have a teacher as effective as Mr. G ever again.  I did test into the next level of math and the honors program at Berkeley High.  This has allowed me to take college level math as a senior in high school, and the only person who can really take responsibility for my achievements is Mr. G.  He taught me everything I needed to know to get ahead in math at any level.  At the time of middle school, I hated him.  But when I look back, I laughed at his strange tactics more than I was ever scared of them.  I learned more from him through his rigorous study sessions than I ever realized in middle school.  And when I think about these things I realize the Mr. Gulimovskiy was the greatest teacher I have ever had.