School Features

Never mind that that works out to about 1,689 problems per student among him and his 591 classmates.

“I got the idea from a book I read,” he said. “The kid in the book challenged his school, so I knew I could do it here, that we could do this.”

Last week, McVey rewarded his schoolmates with a candy party for making the goal, setting up a station near the playground where students lined up class by class to collect. Costco generously donated the candy, McVey said.

McVey approached principal Roz Schott with his idea, and she immediately jumped on board.

“I wasn’t nervous at all,” he said of voluntarily heading to the principal’s office. “I just told her my idea, and she said she would talk to the staff. She said everyone liked the idea.”

The goal was 1,000,000 math problems, but first McVey had to work out how to divide up the total among Discovery’s 24 classrooms.

“We had to sit down and do it all on paper first,” he said.

No, that extra work didn’t count toward the million.

“I did that part with a calculator, so that meant it didn’t count,” he said. “We had to do all of the problems ourselves.”

Discovery Elementary second grader Pierce McVey passes out candy to his fellow students, in celebration of the school achieving his goal of correctly solving 1,000,000 math problems.  McVey said he read a book in which a character inspired his school, and knew Discovery could meet the challenge as well. Pictured with McVey are mom, Amy, and Discovery parent/Olivia Park paraeducator Susan Davis.

“Each classroom had a student add the number of math problem for their class,” Schott said. “We did have a goal for each classroom to reach – but it soon had a life of its own! Everyone contributed.”

Each classroom computed the number of problems as well, Schott said, as well as their after-school math program work.

“It was great!” first grader Marcus McIver said. “My job was to add up all the math problems our class did each day, and that was a math problem.”

Aaliyah Magee said the project made her feel smarter.

 “Kids were motivated to work at home on the weekends and in the evening," Schott said. “This is the really cool part – it gets parents on board, and kids love the idea of keeping track of how many they did.”

“It was fun and helped us learn more strategies to solve all sorts of math problems,” fifth grader Bryce McVey said.

Pierce McVey said his favorite subjects are math and science, and he does math problems at home just for the fun of it.

“He’s now multiplying up to a million just for fun,” mom Amy said.

“My teacher, Mr. Church, really makes math fun,” McVey said. “He’s a really fun guy. He lets us win prizes and build a remote control Lego project where we use our math.”

Schott kept track of the math problems and announced the running total on the public address system each Monday morning, McVey said.

“I wasn’t worried at all (about making the goal). When we heard we were almost halfway through, I knew we were going to do it,” he said of finishing the goal.

The most fun part about the challenge?

“Doing the math. That was even more fun than the candy,” McVey said.