http://whstherebellion.com/?p=4589Young Senior Leads Math Team To Best Finish In Decades
by Julie Fortin
Walpole, MA
Imagine being 11 years old and being a new student in high school. Your friends are stilling smoothing out the kinks of basic math and geography; instead, you are learning the complexities of geometry and biology. That was the reality for John Gillespie, now a 15 year old senior at Walpole High School.
John has had a atypical experience as a student: in 2007, he enrolled at the high school as a sophomore - at 11 years of age.
Over the course of his three years at Walpole High School, John has thrived; more specifically, he has become an integral part of the math team. With the advantage of counting as an underclassman but having the knowledge of an upperclassman, John was recruited for the math team sophomore year while taking pre-calculus honors with Ms. Kathleen Milne. During that year, he was named among the division�s top scorers. He also had the prestigious honor of receiving the gold medal for math as a junior and earning the Rensselaer medal in the same year.
However, John�s real achievements have come during the 2009-2010 season - his senior year. Although he has always been a �valuable contributor to the math team,� says Ms. Milne, he has been �performing with a greater consistency [this year] than in the past.� This consistency has allowed John to be named the third highest scoring senior in the Southerastern Massachusetts Association of Mathematics Leagues (SMML). He has also maintained a minimum of at least 13 points per meet.
With such a strong individual performance in the math team, John has been a key component to this year�s math team, which has proven to be the most successful team in Walpole�s history. After the team�s first qualification in the Massachusetts Association of Mathematics Leagues (MAML) tournament since 1997 last year, the team�s goal was to beat at least one team in the large school division. This year, the team finished 4th place out of 32 teams and then placed third at the playoffs - their best finish in nineteen years.
John and the math team also competed in the state invitational tournament as a medium school on Friday April 9th at Shrewsbury High School. Their qualification for the tournament itself was a great feat as only a few years ago the team only scored a mere 25 points out of 204 in regular season meets. During the tournament, the team finished eighth out of twelve teams - scoring eighteen points total - while John managed a perfect score of six points in the arithmitic portion of the competition.
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Good for him, and kudos to the school for being flexible.
