My Glory Days are Numbered
By Neal Wooten
The older I get, the more my mind instinctively drifts back to the proverbial good old days. I find myself reminiscing about baseball, football, powerlifting, arm wrestling, and tennis events, but the one event I relive the most was a mental contest.
Tonie Niblett put together a math team at Sylvania and I made the team. For those of you who are not good at math and think this sounds horrible, it was. Math team practices were an exercise in torture. As Sam Malone once said on Cheers, “I’d rather shave my head with a cheese grater while chewing on tinfoil.”
One day we traveled to Austin High School in Decatur, a large 5A school, to compete in a tournament. These events consisted of two parts: a written test and ciphering, where students from each team were seated in a large gymnasium, and problems were projected onto a screen. The students who solved it the fastest were awarded points.
The written test this day consisted of 40 questions and four tiebreakers. Mrs. Niblett had one rule: If you answer a question, make sure it’s the right answer. The reason was simple; there was a penalty for guessing and wrong answers counted off. There were always some students who finished with a negative score.
I’m not sure how or why something happened to me that day, but it’s something that had never happened to me before… or since. Everything seemed so clear. Everything made sense. Even with advanced math problem we had never even studied, the formulas were just appearing in my mind.
After the test was over, as was customary, Mrs. Niblett asked everyone how many they answered. Answers ranged from “eight” to “12.” I kept hoping there would be an earthquake to distract her before she got to me, but no such luck. When I told her I answered all of them, if she’d had a ball bat, I’m pretty sure she would have conked me with it.
At the awards ceremony, which was usually just a formality for us to attend since we couldn’t really compete with these huge school, we took our seats in an auditorium. The announcer called out the third-place winner and he calmly strolled down the steps to claim his trophy. Same with the second-place finisher. Then he leaned into the mic and said, “First place – Neal Wooten, Sylvania.” I tripped twice on my way to the stage.
My team’s collective score was the highest also, so we took home two first-place trophies that day. When they told us we would use Algebra every day for the rest of our lives, I didn’t know they meant in our memories.