Pi Day Sweet for Middle School Students

Geneva Middle School South Principal Terry Bleau and Assistant Principal Jane Schwartz sported “Pi” T-shirts when they walked into the cafeteria to celebrate Pi Day with their seventh- and eighth-grade students.

A few minutes later, Bleau and Schwartz were wearing “pi” smeared all over their heads and torsos, as each of them got a whipped cream pie in the face from students who competed for the opportunity in a daylong pi recital.

“I like whipped cream, so it’s OK,” Schwartz said as she wiped away the worst of the sticky sweetness after the assembly. “But I am going straight home to clean up.”

Like many schools, GMSS celebrates Pi Day every March 14 because that date can be written as “3.14,” the first three digits in the mathematical constant commonly used to calculate the circumference, diameter and radius of a circle. Seventh- and eighth-graders held contests in their math classes Monday to see who could recite the most digits in pi, which is an infinite nonrepeating decimal with an unlimited number of digits. While participation was optional, most students gave it a try, said seventh-grade math teacher Heather Kontos.

“Almost every student in my classes entered the contest,” she said. “They really have fun with it, and it gives them a good appreciation of circles and infinite nonrepeating decimals.”

Students definitely had a taste for pi as they entered the cafeteria Monday afternoon. Several were chanting strings of digits to each other, while others gossiped about who had won the contest. When Kontos called the winners onto the tarp-covered stage to receive their prizes, they got the kind of applause usually reserved for rock stars at a concert.

After the top two seventh-graders accepted their McDonald’s gift cards and the top two eighth-graders accepted their “Pi” T-shirts, Schwartz gingerly took her seat on a chair in the center of the tarp and let "7-White" team winner Arthur Laurence and "7-Blue" team winner Bella Bernath jointly pushed the pie into her face.

Bleau played to the crowd, doing warmup stretches and gesturing students to “bring it on," before 8-White winner Rachel Valiunas and 8-Blue winner Zane Shaw gave him the pie treatment, leaving him with the paper plate rubbed onto the top of his head.

Laurence recited pi to 207 decimal places. Bernath recited 240 decimal places, Valiunas 232 decimal places and Shaw 212 decimal places.

“I tried the contest, but I went too fast and got one number off at about the 40th decimal place,” said seventh-grader Max Lemen. “It’s really hard to keep them all straight. But I got to see the principals get pies in the face. That was really funny.”

“I only got seven digits because I just said them off the top of my head,” confessed seventh-grader Katie O’Brien. “Pi Day is a good way to remember pi and what it’s used for—plus I got an Oreo for getting seven digits in class.”