After school Friday, April 9, over 30 students crammed into Calculus teacher Pam Fangohr’s room to witness a much-anticipated integration competition. The contest was a rematch of November’s derivative duel between heavily-favored Fangohr and physics teacher Andy Bricker. In addition to the two teachers, last Friday’s bout featured an additional competitor in senior Calculus BC student Matt Montes de Oca, but the result was the same.
Fangohr followed up her derivatives victory with an equally-impressive 15-3-3 win in the integration contest.
Despite the sound defeat, both Bricker and Montes de Oca feel they performed fairly well.
“It was a lot of fun,” Montes de Oca said. “I think experience played a factor. It was really different with the crowd.”
The two underdogs trained together in the week prior to competition, practicing problems during seminar and after school. Nevertheless, the pressure seems to have gotten to them both, particularly the younger Montes de Oca.
The senior found all his anti-derivatives correctly and was in position to answer all ten questions correctly. However, he failed to complete the problems accurately.
“I’m concerned that Matt missed a whole bunch,” Fangohr said. “He just passed the integration test.”
Montes de Oca was in excellent position after the first five minutes of competition, and many in the crowd estimated he was in the lead for a moment.
“I thought he had a pretty good chance,” senior Himal Sherchan said. “I don’t mean to say that the teachers were about to lose. I felt like he was the young jedi.”
However, he wrote down his answer to the fourth question in the third position and upon realizing his mistake, erased both answers, costing himself valuable time. He never fully recovered
Bricker also let a promising start slip away. The physics teacher employed an age-old test-taking strategy and skipped to problems he knew he could do. Consequently, he got off to a hot start and answered his first two correctly.
Bricker and Montes de Oca enjoyed overwhelming fan support, and rode the early excitement to good starts. Meanwhile Fangohr was portrayed in a pre-game video as “Darth Fangohr” and played the role of the overwhelming favorite.
“Darth Fangohr?” she said. “What is that?”
Despite the initial excitement and crowd bias, the result was never in serious doubt. Fangohr reaffirmed her dominance, and Bricker and Montes de Oca were just along for the ride.
Said Fangohr of the lopsided final score: “It is what it is.”
Watch the video of the event by clicking this link.