HAMILTON — Walking into Hamilton Central School on Oct. 15 for the first multi-district Mathletics competition of the school year was like walking into my own past.

I took particular interest in covering the contest that early Saturday morning. I am a former Mathletics team member myself, competing for the Vernon-
Verona-Sherrill Central School team back in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Even more memorable was my Mathletics coach at that time was VVS high school trigonometry and pioneering computer science teacher Allen Jaquays - my dad, who passed away in 2016.

I am sure Dad would be thrilled to see that the competition has really hardly changed at all since those days. There were no electronic mathematics processing gadgets in sight. Some 150 students from 11 area school districts still used old-school methods like pencils and paper while competing in a series of math problem challenges — just like the old days.

Mathletics meets are divided into three sections: the first is a 45-minute individual 10-question test, and the second is a 20-minute group activity where the whole five-member team gets to pool its brain power to solve a math puzzle.

The most well-remembered part of Mathletics for me is the final task - a set of four five-minute relay race-style contests where students sit in a row of five seats. The first student finds his or her answer to a problem and passes solely that number back to the next student, who inputs that figure into his or her own question to come up with the number for the following student to use. This process continues to the fifth seat for the final answer.

But when the number that has been passed back obviously does not compute when used in the next problem, the front student is notified to try again. That notification often came in the form of a kick to the backside, and if I passed another answer that didn’t fit, the kick got even harder. I swear, seeing the students that morning in their own rows of seats flashed me right back to feeling the kicks of frustration from behind.

Kudos to the current members of the VVS team, under the coaching of their own middle school math teacher, Michael Dunne, as they came in second in Division A that day.

The questions posed to the student mathletes were also a blast from the past, and I was told they have been used and reused for so many years now that some might have actually been the same as those used during my own tenure. And some might even have been written by my dad back in the day, so there was a connection across the generation there as well.

Sadly, after all of the years that have passed, I could not remember how to answer any of the math problems I saw there that morning. Luckily, I wasn’t in one of the relay hot seats, or I would definitely have been experiencing the dreaded kick of rejection.

While Dad would be proud of Mathletics carrying on its tradition, he likely wouldn’t be too proud of my own performance if I was on that team that day.

See the related story here: Mathletics competitors ‘working together to try to do better,’ https://bit.ly/3V5rvb5