Pi Day- every math nerd's favorite day of the year!

My first Pi Day as a math teacher has come and gone. And oh what a day it was! As my overly nerdy, math-dork, bubbly self, I became the 'pi day committee' at my school and organized quite the event!

For those of you who do not know Pi Day is always March 14th (3 -14) for the amazing mathematical number that is π = 3.1415926535... And the joke to the right plays on the fact that π is not a rational number and i is not a real number. In my opinion, it's the most classic math joke and I love it.

Many schools do a digits of Pi memorization contest. Considering π has infinitely many digits the opportunity for kids to compete to memorize the most is endless! I took our pi day celebration to the next level! Not only did we do a digits contest, but we also did a pi- joke or comic contest. And to top it all off I organized a fundraiser to raise money for St. Jude's Cancer Research Hospital's Math-a-thon. Students could buy tickets for $1 from their advisory, they wrote their names on the tickets and entered them into a pool. The two advisories that raised the most money won a pizza party and the students who bought tickets were entered into a drawing to win the opportunity to PIE A TEACHER IN THE FACE! :)




We had about 150 students (half of the student body) show up to the celebration, which was after school on March 14th. About 15 students participated in the memorization contest- the winner had over 100 digits memorized! Wowzers! And the winning joke is above... pretty funny huh?! The winner of the digit contest won a large pie, the top 3 along with the writer of the joke won a medium pie and anyone who memorized at least 15 digits won a little pie. We ended up having a lot of the mini pies left over (maybe because I made a million of them!) and we raffled them off at the end. Yummm... Pie....


Our students ended up raising over $320 and pie-ing all 13 teachers who participated in the face with whip cream pies! We even pied the principal! I made an iSchool smock and brought in a shower cap to protest ourselves, but it was to no avail, the whip cream got EVERYWHERE. The two pictures below are of me getting pied in the face by one of my students, Kevin...




















I had whip cream in my ears, in my hair and even after rinsing off at school, when I got home Zach kissed me on the check and told me i tasted sweet! Overall it was extremely fun and successful!!