It was finally time for the senior awards. All of the participants and teachers in the audience suddenly got quiet. The speaker first announced the team awards, which adds the top four scores from every school.

Starting from 10th place, the announcer called various schools to receive their award. All of the CHS students there waited anxiously for CHS to be called. And finally, when the speaker announced first place, Clayton was called.

All of the CHS students cheered as seniors Jeffrey Cheng, Nathaniel Rowe, Jake Shepard, and Sam Rubin went to receive their trophy.

But the excitement was not over. The speaker began to announce the individual winners. Nathaniel Rowe in 5th place. Then Jeffrey Cheng in 4th place. The anticipation continued to grow as the speaker announced third place, and then second.

But finally, after the long wait, the announcer revealed that Rubin won first place in Division 1 of this year’s Excellence in Mathematics contest.

On Saturday, Nov 1, 16 CHS students, four from each grade, traveled to the St. Louis Community College at Forest Park to participate in this annual math competition.

The contest consists of 20 multiple choice questions to complete in 63 minutes. Kurt Kleinberg, who was one of the teachers who went to the contest, comments, “For the 10 years that I have been working with the contest, it has not changed much. The format is the same: it’s still 20 minutes, still an hour and three minutes, which is weird, but the three minutes is for bubbling.”

This year, Clayton took more students than most previous years and brought home more awards as well. “I think we performed really, really well this year. Compared to the last two years, we’ve had triple the amount of people that we brought. This is the first year in four years where we had entire teams of four for each grade level” said Kleinberg.

This contest gives a $1000 scholarship to the first place senior individual winner in both Division 1 and Division 2. Rubin won this scholarship this year, but Clayton has not had a senior win for many years, with the most recent previous scholarship to Charlie Beard.

This year is only Rubin’s second year attending the contest, receiving 13th place last year. Rubin recalls this year’s award ceremony, “I wasn’t sure whether I had done better than Jeffrey because I had changed an answer at the last minute and I wasn’t sure if had erased it enough for the scantron machine. As they announced third and second place, Jeffrey kept telling me that he thought I would win. I didn’t believe him; I didn’t think my score was high enough to win. But then, sure enough, they called my name.”

Rubin and the senior team were not the only ones to take home awards. In fact, all of the CHS students who went the contest received an award.

Both the Freshman and Sophomore teams of four received third place, and the Junior team received fourth place. Many CHS participants in all grade levels received many individual awards as well, including Sophomore Tong Zhou in second place.

Clayton’s performed amazingly in this competition, and can continue to compete strongly in the math competitions that are later in the year.