Woodbridge Middle School celebrates the importance of Pi with an assembly which consists of pie a teacher in the face, a pie eating contest, and having a winner who can recite the most digits of pi.
The assembly was planned by one of the many WMS math teachers Mrs. Burke, who is extremely passionate about pi. She exclaimed, “it is my favorite day of the year.”
Mrs. Burke loves spending time planning it, so students can have fun and get an understanding on why 3.14 is so important. She said, “we would have a very boring world without pi… it is the basis of all circles.”
This year’s Pi day champion was Jillian Peralta. This is her second consecutive year winning. She recited 314 digits of Pi. Jillian beat the school record of 312 digits. She achieved her goal of over 300. Jillian achieved a total of 261 digits of pie last year.
She said, “Last year I crammed everything the week before… this year I will be practicing more, because practice makes progress.” Practicing really made an impact on Jillian’s results. She continued, “It is such a great honor having been a winner twice..it is nice to be recognized as a specialty because of how hard I worked having to memorize the digits of pi.”
Teachers also shared how they felt about being pied in the face. Mrs. Douglas, Mr. Olvesen, and Mr. Malmstrom shared unique opinions.
Mr. Malmstrom stated, “I feel that the pi day assembly is fun and gives students more opportunities to enjoy coming to school. It is for a great cause even though I despise math.”
Even though he said he hates math he explained, “I enjoy helping Mrs. Burke out, [and] anything that makes me look silly in the name of education and makes students have more fun. I’m happy to do it again and will be volunteering every year we have it.”
Mr. Malmstrom was asked if he could pick one flavor of pie to be pied with what flavor would you pick, he answered without thinking twice about Key Lime pie. Mr. Malmstrom stated, “it’s easily my favorite, although it would be pretty disgusting. In fact this year we got an option of shaving cream or whipped cream.”
He said he would pick shaving cream, but he feels as though it would be “cheating.” Mr. Malmstrom said, “Whipped cream starts to get in your ears then hair and starts to smell like old milk after about an hour.” He ended up choosing to be pied with whipped cream and had to take 3 showers.
One of Woodbridge Middle School’s ELA teachers, Mrs. Douglas volunteered to get pied. She said, “I think what Mrs. Burke is [planning] is a fantastic event and it gets kids really into pi day. I thought why not give more opportunities, some kids might want to pie a Language arts teacher.”
Likewise, Mr. Douglas isn’t the biggest fan of math, she said, “I thought maybe by volunteering for a math assembly I show support for math by not actually having to do the math.”
Mrs. Douglas said her pie of choice would be chocolate banana pudding pie because “it is the bomb.”
Science and STEM teacher, Mr. Olvesen volunteered to be pied in the pie day assembly, because of “peer pressure.” He said, “his colleagues and students [influenced his decision to volunteer]”
Mr. Olvesen’s pie of choice was an icebox cake, but since that doesn’t count as pi he said he, “could probably do some type of vanilla, blueberry, or chocolate pie.”
