Thursday, February 2, 2023. Before the actual classes begin, Glen opens his email inbox and finds himself with an email forwarded to him by Trent regarding the Venomous Agendas' results at the Square Root of the Answer.
"Yes! They did it! This wager has borne its fruits!" Glen exclaims, upon reading about the VAs' place in the state's leaderboard.
"What is it now?" the secretary asks him.
"The VAs fought tooth-and-nail, it was close but what matters is the Venomous Agendas' mathletics win, and a state title, for once"
Never mind that, at the SRA, only 2 Louisiana schools competed, and Benjamin-Franklin, in New Orleans, both narrowly lost and narrowly missed the qualification threshold. We're on the right track and this $600 was well spent, he muses before he opens the PA.
"Good morning: today we finally bear good news from the extracurricular teams! The school won the state championship in the first round of the Square Root of the Answer math contest and is therefore automatically qualified for the national final! Congratulations to the Venomous Agendas' mathletes!" Glen, the principal, blares in the PA system.
"What material does the national final cover, and when is it?" the secretary asks him.
"Late April and it covers multi-variable calculus. I guess, if they can compress six months of single-variable calculus in two months, they can compress multi-variable calculus in three"
The qualification threshold for non-state champions amounts to the best 4 players each getting 5s on the AP Calculus BC test. I expected the competition to be stiffer, for some reason. But make no mistake: maybe winning the SRA would inspire everyone to do better in class going forward, at least in quantitative subjects. Which, for years, were our weakness, Glen reflects on the implications of the SRA for the rest of the kids. Yet he also realizes that he should issue a warning against idolizing anyone too much. Doesn't matter what you idolize someone for, if you idolize someone too much, it hurts everyone involved. However, I don't want to sabotage what I want out of the school by issuing the warning this early. It does take adequate resources and motivated students, however, to transform school culture like this. Already that Éliane was an exceptional student, or at least what passes for exceptional here, Gen comes along and shows even greater potential. It's hard for me as an administrator to resist the temptation to milk her.
Yet the harsh reality is that the rift between the academic haves and the have-nots has been widening during the pandemic. Of course, this was one of Glen's happy days as a principal, but another staffer was wondering what the fuss was about. About why mathletics suddenly took center stage like never before.
"Why is it that you waited until the SRA's results to be released to even talk about how our math team performs?" a puzzled nurse asks the principal with a troublemaker student in tow.
"It has all to do with the timing of the release of the other tournament's results, the AMC-twelve. We didn't want the news to distract the kids from their exams" the principal then tells the nurse. "What did this kid do to land in my office?"
"That kid attempted to disrupt class, but only got hurt in the process" the nurse then explains to him.
Glen then turns to the troublemaker. "Do you have anything to say in your defense?"
"I tried to raise my chair because I couldn't see anything on the board! And then I fell off my chair and got hurt"
"In the future, if possible, get seated closer to the front or get an appointment with an optometrist" Glen advises the troublemaker before punishing him.
"Optometrist?" a confused troublemaker asks the principal.
"I'll call your parents and tell them what an optometrist is" Glen then had the troublemaker watch him call his parents.
"My son fell off a chair in class because he couldn't see anything on the board? And you're telling me that I should have my son's eyes tested?" an angry parent asks the principal.
"Falling off a chair might be disruptive but maybe your son has eyesight problems. Which go well beyond behavior problems alone. But until then, your son is in detention today after school!" punishment is then meted out.
"Not today, it's his appointment with the optometrist!" the troublemaker's mother pleads with the principal to postpone her son's detention.
"Tomorrow night then"
Said detention on Friday proves to be too noisy at least at the onset since the normal room used for math team practices is right next to the detention room. However, this is not one's regular math team practice because there are dozens upon dozens of students wanting to have a glimpse of their new darlings, spurred by the mathletes' friends. Who, in turn, bring in their own friends to the math team's practice.
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Under normal circumstances, there is no one who wants to attend the math team's practices at this point of the school year; however, winning the Square Root of the Answer's state phase made people come out of the woodwork.
"What is the meaning of this?" Trent asks, astonished by the crowd size of today's session.
What's all this noise? This is nothing like a regular math team practice! Glen could hear the difference in noise of the math team practice since the regular practices are held in a room 2 rooms away from his office. Normal math team practices weren't noisy enough to be heard from 2 classrooms away, this one is. And the room is overcrowded for any regular classroom in use in this school.
As soon as he steps out of the room, he hears Trent make his announcement regarding relocation of the practice in front of the crowd:
"Because of high attendance, the math club meeting will be held in the auditorium" Trent announces to the crowd.
Stolen novel; please report.
Here's my chance to see firsthand the fruits of the hard work our kids put in, and also what we reused the football money for, Glen muses, remaining at the very back of the auditorium. After all, he recognizes several of the attendees, such as Curtis, Dylan and Randy, for having attended the homecoming's football game. I wonder who their friends on the math team are, or whether the mathletes are the friends of their friends.
While Curtis keeps quiet and is seated next to Éliane, on the other hand, Gen and her friends had a sizeable number of admirers close by in the auditorium as the warmup questions start with past AIME questions.
Now it becomes clear to the entire Venomous Agenda community that mathletics could at least supplement sports in the short term, and it was not as mind-numbing as football has been. Yet he knew as well as any other high school administrator that he shouldn't hold on to any of today's stars in the long term.
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At the end of the practice, while most kids didn't even notice the presence of the principal, one of them starts to dispute him, feeling a little unhappy about mathletics taking center stage.
"I'm a little concerned. Why is it that mathletics should be celebrated over the arts?" Catalena then starts to dispute the principal.
"It's not that arts shouldn't be celebrated, arts are a gamble, the same kind of gamble as sports. Academic endeavors are the way to go for the future because you will then have more career opportunities" Glen explains to her.
"You were outplayed by your own teachers! More than ever, you seem to be using the students as cards in your own poker game! You were reveling in the glory they brought the school and, by extension, you!" Catalena fumes against him.
Glen may have been reveling in the glory brought by the mathletics team, but he did so quietly. He simply wanted to better understand what made them burst on the social stage so he would know whether the school's cultural shift can last an additional year.
"You must understand the following: high school doesn't last forever. And certainly not the glories accrued as a high school student. Make the most out of your high school years" he grumbles.
"As the lead actress in the school spring play, you must stop treating kids in extracurriculars as disposable pawns! All extracurriculars should be treated on an equal footing!" Catalena pleads with the principal, but she has no idea of what treating extracurriculars on an equal footing means to her.
"You must understand that quiz bowl, debate teams fly under the radar not only here but at other schools around the state, and arts, too. We have two yearly band concerts, two yearly plays, and I attend all of them" the principal then responds to the Hispanic student.
Venomous Agendas quiz bowl is middle of the pack, with Marcia being by far our best quiz bowler, and Florence kept our debate team afloat. My own son plays extemp on it, he's one of those lazy extempers whose only hope of victory is to hope his opponents are equally lazy. However tempting it would be to pin all our hopes for the debate state championship and hence Nats on Flo's pair, even if these hopes materialized, attending Nats in Phoenix would be very expensive. Much more so than the HSNCT is if, by some miracle, we qualify for it. So one may be wondering how quiz bowl is treated at Caddo Magnet or Catholic, or, alternatively, debate at Isidore Newman, Glen then reflects on the other Venomous Agendas academic teams. The VAs don't seem to expect much out of the AIME this season.
"Why is it that you didn't at least try to play on the debate team?" Glen asks her.
"I hated the debate coach! And that was before you started treating students as cards in your poker game!" Catalena keeps fuming.
"I'm confused. What did I do to make you feel like a card in a poker game?" the principal asks in a tone of voice that betrays his deteriorating emotional state.
"Remember last year, when the math teachers seemed to be scrambling to look for another girl to play on the math team this season? That you would have been happy with just about anyone for your third girl so long as she was actually playing!"
"Do you have any idea of how impoverished we are in this region? We don't have the extracurricular budget of, say, Caddo Magnet! We are forced to scrape the barrel for every penny to keep offering what little we can! Title IX money was the only lifeline we had for mathletics back then!"
"Let me guess, the parish only cared about mathletics and quiz bowl to the extent that they can be used to bridge gender gaps!" Catalena retorts.
Speaking of gender gaps, while girls at this school perform better in language arts, the gap is less pronounced in social studies. However, as is all too common, boys tended to perform better in math and science, at least before the pandemic. Yet, in today's economy, boys are more likely to feel like they can afford to neglect their education since they can enter the job market more easily than before, and in positions whose educational requirements are very basic.
The extracurricular scene would be more engaging if there was more variety than sports alone. I hope she realizes that schools in this region don't have a whole lot of non-sports ECs, maybe FFA and/or 4-H, or band, theater, but no debate or quiz bowl team, Glen ponders the implications of Catalena transferring away from this school.
"You only see one facet of all these issues you're raising!" the principal then responds to his student. "It's not that they aren't valid, it's not that administrators fail to consider what students live through, to paraphrase you, we must play with the cards we were dealt with, and we can't always get things done"
The metaphorical cards include, yes, spending and leveraging the students. However, other elements include environmental factors the school can't control. I guess, I have a better idea of what the poker game the principal is playing with the students! Catalena then sighs. And of what makes the job of a principal more than just about disciplining students or budgeting!
"I would love for you to be the principal for a day, but unless I spin it as some sort of lottery, for which every student in good standing is entitled to a ticket... it's not going to work" Glen starts thinking of the paperwork required to make a principal for a day raffle work.
The bureaucracy of hosting it would make it so that, at the absolute earliest, it would be several weeks before the PFAD can take place. And the draw itself would be among the later stages of the process, which need to involve the parents of the student so chosen once the PFAD is drawn.
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Upon returning home that day, he then tells his wife about what happened at work. But not before Selena tells about her own day at work, screaming at customers who didn't pay their bills. Dexter, however, is on yet another date with Julie.
"Try to imagine a math team being wildly popular, to the point where they could fill the auditorium for a math team practice and then learn multi-variable calculus!" Glen tells his wife along with Valerie.
"Let me guess, most people didn't understand anything!" Selena goes on a limb.
"Even I struggled sometimes to understand. A lot of people were more interested in the mathletes than in the material, but I don't expect the popularity to be sustained unless we somehow place at the national final of the Square Root of the Answer. For most people, even single-variable calculus is going to be exotic material"
"Dad, when will I be doing multi-variable calculus?" Valerie then asks her father.
"Assuming the math team coach continues to teach calculus to Venomous Agendas, in eleventh grade. Right now, you're doing Algebra I in seventh grade"
It's as clear as day that, for the town, elite mathletes, or what passes for elite mathletes, are the stars of the day. Éliane and Gen are much better liked now, and they are the newest hot thing in town, now it feels like parents want their kids to become mathletes in high school. Especially since mathletics is supposed to supplement their learning in a much more direct way than sports could. The questions are: how elite are they anyway? And how long is this going to last? Glen muses, while he finally goes around to fill out the paperwork for the draw of the PFAD he's planning on hosting, with the students having the opportunity to decline.