Pi Day
Pi day is celebrated on March 14 because the first pi digits are 3.14 and the date is 3/14.
Pi a Teacher
In honor of Pi Day, Southeast Middle School’s leadership class hosted “Pi a Teacher”, a lunch activity. Leadership originally planned for it to be on Friday Mar. 14, Pi Day to celebrate the 125th day at school. However, due to rainy weather conditions, they postponed to Friday, Mar. 21.
Multiple SEMS and DREAMS teachers participated in Southeast’s “Pie a Teacher Day.” Participating teachers had mixed emotions on the idea of getting whipped cream thrown at them by students who may be participating either out of bitterness or sweetness.
Mr.Valenzuela said, “It’s okay, the kids can’t aim but I am a little excited. I think that it’s funny I like it. It’s cool.”
Ms Villa, Math and Culinary Arts teacher shows her enthusiasm. She explains how she felt excited when she got pied last year by students and how she had a great and fun time. After getting pied she said, “When I tried the pie from my face, it tasted pretty good.”
Not everyone has positive thoughts about getting a pie thrown at them. 8th grade English and film teacher, Mr.Vargas jokingly said, “I did not appreciate that they didn’t give us goggles, I got hit in my eyes and it burned. I will send my hospital bill somewhere.”
Mr. Dang, the Math Coach and Accelerated Math teacher, says he will not participate in this activity due to his “allergy to all the ingredients.”
Pi Challenge
Teachers recited the digits of pi they knew. Most teachers only got to 3.14. Three 8th grade students, Mark Gonzalez, Yeira Aguniga, and Jamila Villalba share some techniques on how they have memorized multiple digits of PI.
Jamila Villalba, 8th grade DREAMS student, memorized 227 digits of pie. She shared the kinds of strategies she had to memorize that many pi digits. “I would just look at the paper that I was given and look at it over and over again and the rows. I would memorize it by 2 digits. Since I did the contest last year, it took me 10 mins to memorize 100 digits and I learned 127 more. To fully memorize it took me about a day. Last year I knew up to 167”.
Mark Gonzalez said he memorized 100 digits by “looking at them like phone numbers, years, and combinations to numbers… it takes me about 4 days to remember them. I was really focused for 4 days. I’ve been trying to learn for about a month before that.”
Yeira Aguiniga memorized around 60 digits of pie. She said, “I memorize it as if it were phone numbers.” She said that it only took her 3 days to remember the digits of pi.
Pi day is a day to remember a really complicated irrational number. Whether you know the first 3 digits or up to 227.
