For much of my life, I’ve been good at math. I’ve rarely been consistently great at math though I’ve had fleeting moments of greatness.
Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, used to host an annual high school math team contest. There were four high school sports divisions in Alabama back then, 1A through 4A. Schools’ math teams were in the same division as their sports teams. This contest apparently originated a few years before I was in the 11th grade. It doesn’t appear to be taking place at Samford now. But in 1971 and 1972, it was a big deal for math geeks.
In the winter of 1971, I was in the 11th grade and was a member of my school’s team. We went to Samford, and I remember taking a multiple-choice test that seemed pretty straightforward. Correct answers counted a point, incorrect answers counted some negative fraction of a point. If you just guessed on every answer, you were liable to have a negative score. Our team did well, though we didn’t win, and I think we were ranked somewhere in the top 15. I had a good time and wanted to do it again.
The next year, my senior year, I was fired up about going to the contest again. I wasn’t fired up about my schoolwork, though, and my grades weren’t very good. I was just getting by. Ms. Ingram, our math teacher, told me one day she wasn’t sure I needed to be on the team that year. So, I started trying a little harder in class. She gave a test quiz to anyone who wanted to be on the math team, and I must have done well; she chose me for the team again.
On the day of the contest, my father was recovering from kidney surgery at a Birmingham hospital, so I drove the family car by myself. I planned to see him after the contest. Ms. Ingram and the team met in Childersburg that morning. The weather was brisk, and I remember hearing Van Morrison’s “Blue Money” and “Domino” from Birmingham’s WSGN radio station. I was young and fired up.
We arrived at Samford University, checked in, and soon the contest was underway. The multiple-choice test was harder than the previous year’s test. We met after the test, and we were all down. There was a verbal part of the contest where each member of each team had a chance to solve problems that were displayed using an overhead projector (old school). The first person to answer gets the points. Each of us managed to solve one of these. We were upset about the verbal part of the contest, we all thought we choked and should’ve answered most of them correctly.
The contest ended, and Ms. Ingram asked if we wanted to attend the awards ceremony, and we all said yes. The awards presentation was held in a basketball arena that had wooden bleachers on each side. We were sitting on the top rows of the bleachers and blabbing non-stop. Maybe I was doing most of the talking. Someone we didn’t know, possibly a teacher from another school told us we needed to be quiet or he’d have us removed from the facility. I resisted the urge to suggest he go to hell. Instead, we briefly stopped talking as the ceremony began. They announced the top three schools for 1A, then the top three schools for 2A and the top three schools for 3A. The winning school for 3A was “Childersburg High School.”
None of us expected this, and I’m pretty sure Ms. Ingram didn’t either. This was one of the top adrenaline attacks of my life. The four of us screamed like wild savages and ran down the wooden bleachers as fast and loud as possible. Maybe I led the way.
BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!!!!!!!
We reached the trophy and grabbed it like it was made of gold. Ms. Ingram joined us eventually, and I realized she was embarrassed. We didn’t care, we were champions and were loving the moment. Before long, she took the trophy from us, and we left to go home.
I stopped to see my father at the hospital. He was glad to hear we’d won. I was happy to see he was looking good. I thought he was an old man, but I realize now he was 44, decades younger than my current age as I write this.
The next week at school, Ms. Ingram had a list of individual scores from the contest, ranked highest to lowest. There were several hundred names on the list, and none of us were in the top 60. Our four scores were bunched close together between 61 and 69. I realize now that none of us were geniuses. We were reasonably smart guys who’d been taught well by Ms. Ingram. She deserves credit for the championship far more than any of us.
In fact, if not for Ms. Ingram in high school (and Mr. Grayson in 8th grade, and Ms. Peerson in the 10th grade), I probably would not have been able to receive my BS in General Mathematics at Auburn University.