RHS AP Calculus teacher  Michelle Walton will be advising the school’s very first math team. Junior Dylan Kay took the role as president of the club.

“Well I love math,” Kay said. “It’s a really big part of my life now so I just wanted to build a great club.”

Kay’s best friend junior Jackson Mann is also in Walton’s AP Calculus class and plans on being vice-president of the team.

“There was another student who was originally leading math club who kind of told our class about it,” Mann said. “Additionally Dylan is one of my best friends and we joined it together because math is just something that we like to do, we think it’s fun.”

One of the main focuses of the club is competing. According to Walton, the club is focusing their attention on different kinds of competitions they could participate in.

“There’s actually a lot of them. There’s more than I could even count. We’re going to focus on probably doing two different ones, one that you submit your answers either online or you mail them in and then they tell you how you did compared to other schools,” Walton said. “We’ll try to do a traveling one where you go to a location and test at the place. It’s kind of more like an academic decathalon, but purely for math.”

Kay hopes for a successful year in terms of competing.

“Well I hope we can win,” Kay said.

Walton not only hopes to win as much as possible, but spark interest and bring attraction to math.

“I hope that we get some people excited about math and see it as a little more fun and interesting than just boring worksheets all day,” Walton said.

According to Kay, he’s grateful a teacher like Walton is the advisor.

“She’s a really good teacher,” Kay said. “She always helps me and give good explanations, she’s just a really good teacher. I’m glad she’s the administrator.”

Mann have an extensive love for math and appreciates how versatile it is.

“I definitely like how math is really challenging and has a lot of complexity,” Mann said. “There’s a ton of different levels of math: you can go to trigonometry, calculus, algebra [and] geometry. I just think it’s really interesting.”