JPPS:2009 Canadian National Mathematics League Champions

It can now officially be said that the brightest young mathematical minds in Canada hail from the Jewish Peoples and Peretz School in Montreal. The brilliant JPPS team of 14 Grade 6 students has won the Canadian National Mathematics League’s annual competition for the elementary school level, beating out 398 other participating schools. By finishing first overall in Canada, JPPS, by extension, also placed first in their home province of Quebec.

The wonderful news does not end there. With a score of 98% (39 questions correct out of 40), JPPS student Noam Barsheshat received the highest score in all of Canada! Moreover, four of her classmates, Shawn Gordon, Noah Cohen, Ilana Nyveen, and Andrew Hersh, scored the five highest results in the entire province of Quebec!

Over one million elementary and secondary students in North America participate every year in the contest, created in 1977. The elementary school version of the contest consists of 40 multiple-choice questions given in a 30-minute time period. The team score for each school is the sum of the top five scores for that school. A perfect team score for a single contest would be 200. JPPS’s grand total was a phenomenal 187 out of 200.

Sheila Perry, teacher of the victorious accelerated group class, and Ireene Wolfson, longtime JPPS math teacher and team mentor, demonstrated their sense of pride with the following joint statement: “We are overjoyed and simply bursting at the seams! The students worked so hard and were drilled to the absolute maximum. But all the effort certainly paid dividends.”

The contest questions are designed to cover a range of mathematical knowledge for each grade level. Topics focus mainly on exponents, geometry, and especially logic.