School portraits / State math contest · April 2024
They Stopped Listening Just Before Their Names Were Called
At the 2024 Illinois state math contest, two Latin School of Chicago students made a small mistake and assumed they'd lost. By third place they weren't listening. They had won.
On April 6, 2024, the Latin School of Chicago's math team competed in the Illinois Council for Teachers of Mathematics state contest. According to the student paper, The Forum, twenty-one students entered individual and team events: eight-person teams solving twenty problems in twenty minutes, and two-person teams racing other pairs one problem at a time.
In the oral round, a junior and a senior made a small mistake, and left feeling unconfident. At the awards ceremony, placements were announced in reverse order.
Their coach, Chris van Benthuysen, described the next part. "By third and second place, they were no longer even listening to the announcements." Then first place: Latin School of Chicago, and their names. "Neither of them even heard it," he said. The team had to yell at them, several times, until one of them understood. The coach called the look on his face priceless.
They had prepared themselves so thoroughly for bad news that they missed the good news. Every parent knows this skill. Most of us learned it from our own children, at report-card time.
The team won eleven awards that day. A freshman-sophomore pair took first in their division for the first time in the school's history. The team placed fifth in its division overall; the coach noted that it had been in the top six every year since 2018.
The Latin School has a math tradition for younger students too. For twenty years, its middle school has run a Problem of the Week. Students who solve it are recognized at assembly and get a roll of Smarties. Since 2014, students can also submit their own problems; if a problem is chosen, its author gets a giant roll of Smarties. In 2025-26, half of the 32 problems came from students.
Solve the problem, get a roll of Smarties. Write the problem, get a giant roll. That is the correct exchange rate, and I wish more of the adult world used it.
The middle one has started writing math problems for the youngest. They are mostly about how many cookies she would have left if he took some. She gets them right every time, and then demands the cookies.
Last week he asked me for a giant roll of Smarties, for problem authorship. I told him that first he should check whether anyone had called his name. He said he hadn't been listening.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- The Forum: Math Team Places High at State Championship readtheforum.org
- Latin School: POTW — Math Problems That Unite the Middle School latinschool.org
- Latin School Problem of the Week archive, 2025–26 tcanright.webmate.me
- Niche: Latin School of Chicago reviews niche.com