Schools

Popular Henry Sibley Math Team Leads Conference

Three senior math stars are leading the team toward another conference title.

“How’d that last team test go for you, Jack?”

“How are those points racking up, Mark?”

math team coach, Erik Kluznik, describes seniors Jack O’Leary, Mark Rosno, and Patrick Holec as mathematical “superstars.”

The triumvirate are on their way to leading the team to its sixth conference championship in the past seven years, and the three friends have added extracurricular interest with a “friendly competition” for the highest cumulative point total.

“If I win, Patrick Holec over there has to wear short-shorts for a day to school and Mark Rosno has to present me with a ‘Math-Team-Captain-of-the-Year award during our AP physics class, publicly in front of the whole class,” said O’Leary, who, after three of the five meets in the Classic Suburban Conference’s 2011-12 schedule, has more points than any other student in the conference’s eight registered schools.

Rosno and Holec have a side bet: The winner, Holec says, will get treated to a “nice dinner at Taco Bell.”

This year, the math team has 40 members, all of whom stay after school for instruction and practice, though only eight students’ scores are counted at each meet. 

The split of male and female students is exactly even at 20 and 20, according to Kluznik. The makeup of the eight scored students can change from meet to meet.

The eight students on the “scoring team” each take two four-question 12-minute tests in the subjects of algebra, geometry, algebra II and pre-calculus, Kluznik said. The individual portion is followed by a team competition, where the students work in groups to solve six (harder) questions in 20 minutes.

Kluznik, who is teaching calculus and pre-calculus this year, said he is surprised by the enthusiasm students show for the team.

“We try to make it fun for them, but it always amazes me—I like my job and I love coaching this—but at the same time these kids have to pay an activity fee, they have to come to a separate practice for math, and it’s just basically taking a math test, but for some reason we get a lot of people who like doing it,” he said.

Kluznik said he sees the team pay off for sharp students, challenging them in ways that ordinary coursework cannot.

“It’s very above-and-beyond the problems you’d see in a textbook—it really forces the kids under a very tight time constraint to think creatively about how to apply the things they’ve learned in the past,” he said. “It gives them a strength and flexibility of thought that lots of kids don’t have. Compared with the classroom, the math team is like being on an athletic team instead of being in a gym class.”

O’Leary, Rosno and Holec are all on the school’s cross country team, which Kluznik also coaches, and they said they agreed that there is a good comparison between athletic and mathematical workouts.

“With sprinting, as soon as the gun goes off, it’s a 100-percent focus all the way around the track, and for me, when I take the tests it’s not something you really try for, but it kind of happens and you stay focused,” O’Leary said.

Kluznik said a highlight of the season was the team’s one-point victory over Mahtomedi in late November.

“They were cheering and high-fiving each other,” he said. “It’s not like we have, like in a sport, where there’s an individual play that you see and say, ‘Oh my god, that was awesome,’ so our celebration is after the fact.”

For more on the Sibley Math Team check out the attached sample questions and the video of team captain Jack O’Leary identifying a conic section from its equation.

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