‘Deluge of hope’

His name may not ring as loudly as boxing champ Manny Pacquiao’s or Miss Universe Pageant third runner-up Shamcey Supsup’s but, young as he is, his is definitely an achievement that offers more promise for the country’s future, although it has been much, much less appreciated by his fellow Filipinos.

Adrian Reginald Sy, 14, a first year high school student of St. Jude Catholic School in Manila, scored 100 percent in the 2011 Australian Mathematics Competition (AMC). He was among the 27 students from nine countries—Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Bulgaria, Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia, China and the Philippines—who garnered a perfect score in the annual contest that was participated in by more than 300,000 students from around the world. And it is not the first time he accomplished the feat in an international competition. In July 2010, then 13 years old, he also aced the 14-nation 13th Primary Mathematics World Contest (PMWC).

Even more heartening, Sy is not the only Filipino youngster excelling in such events. In the same 2011 AMC, 10 other Filipino math wizards won Prize awards, and 60 more placed among the top 2 percent of the more than 300,000 participants. In last year’s AMC, Sy was given a Prize award for being among the top 1 percent of over 400,000 participants; four other Filipinos, with identical scores of 9.7 percent, were among the 65 contestants from different countries who topped the event.

“The Philippines continues to do so well in the AMC,” Andrew Byrne, deputy head of mission of the Australian Embassy in Makati City, noted, and commended the awardees for their “mastery of math, the language of modern life.”

However, AMC is not the only international math competition where our numbers aces have stood out. Last month, students from Metro Manila won 14 medals, six of them golds, in the Wizards at Mathematics International Competition (Wizmic) held in Lucknow, India. Earlier, in September, Filipino students bagged 56 medals in the 12-nation 8th International Mathematics and Science Olympiad (Imso), sharing top honors with Singapore and Thailand.

This continuing series of achievements in an international arena is obviously not a trend of recent origin. Early last year, the Department of Science and Technology recognized 303 elementary and high school students who, all together, won 450 medals in more than a dozen international math and science competitions in 2009, for bringing honor to the country and exemplary achievement, awarding each of them the YES (Youth Excellence for Science) medal and installing them in the “roster of honorable young men and women.” Then Science and Technology Secretary Estrella Alabastro hailed them as an “overflowing deluge of hope for the Philippines.”

Sy and company’s medals show this deluge surges on to this day. “More and more Filipino math students are getting competitive. We hope they would inspire other kids to do the same, especially those in public schools,” Dr. Simon Chua, president of Mathematics Trainers’ Guild-Phils. (MTG), enthused on their AMC awards.

Ironically, the achievements of our numbers aces look more like an exception and all the more stand out because the performance of our students in the Trends in International Math and Science Study (TIMSS) test, which is held every four years by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) and conducted by the US-based National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), has been mostly “dismal” and has become “a cause for national shame,” to borrow the words of Butch Hernandez, the executive director of the Eggie Apostol Foundation, whose main advocacy is education reform.

It is noteworthy that the same schools, more or less—like St. Jude Catholic School in Manila, Philippine Science High School in Quezon City, Chiang Kai Shek College, Xavier School, Jubilee Christian Academy, Paref-Southridge, among other schools—are the source of our numbers aces, many of whom are also wards of MTG. This clearly tells us that an effective, quality method of teaching Math is not beyond our reach. The question is, what is keeping our education officials from adopting this model for all our schools?