St. Michael-Albertville's Fifth Grade Math Masters Run Circles Around Statewide Competition

 Quick: can you tell me what percentage of the first 50 counting numbers are prime? Or are you suddenly feeling flustered and inadequate, and wishing you would have just skipped over this darn article?

Sadly, if this were a round of “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader,” I, too, would be admitting defeat. The fifth graders who can quickly spout off answers like these-without a calculator, mind you-and can soundly defeat nearly 50 other schools’ top math students are our very own here in St. Michael-Albertville. These are the district’s 20 students known as the Math Masters.

St. Michael-Albertville’s fifth-graders dominated their rivals at a statewide Math Masters competition in Hutchinson two weeks ago. A total of four five-member teams from the district’s two middle schools took first, second, seventh and eighth places out of 47 participating teams, along with many high individual winners. The district also took home the first and second place titles at last year’s event.

The competition consisted of three different challenges: individual fact drills, individual problem solving rounds and team problem solving rounds. Students had five minutes to answer 75 questions, or as many as they could, for the fact drills round. Problems consisted of both basic fact drills and more challenging order of operation problems that made this writer feel a little squeamish just looking at them. The word problem questions ranged from charts and graphs, statistics, probability and others.  

The STMA coaches and teams say that their secret weapon to victory was the extra time spent practicing after school to prepare. Some schools don’t have their teams practice together before the competition, but STMA’s students practiced two afternoons per week beginning in February with coaches Chris Daniels and Allen Smith.

“We usually did a couple fact drills and a couple of team rounds and individual rounds,” said Middle School East Math Master Nick Hamer.

 “The same stuff as we did in Hutchinson, just less of it,” Rosanna Chanthamontry added.

Besides just practicing their math drills, they also go over working as a team and how to split up the problems they are given to work efficiently.

“Some students may be really smart in math but might not be able to work as well in a team,” Daniels said. “It gives us quite an advantage to be able to practice together so much.”

Math Master students are chosen through a qualification test among students in the fifth grade challenge math program. Ten students from each middle school are ultimately chosen to be a part of the team, where they will tell you, with confidence, that 30 percent of the first 50 counting numbers are prime. But you already had that one nailed, right?