While the Arizona Wildcats basketball team plays in the men’s Final Four for the first time in 25 years, the Final Four in Matthew King’s fourth-grade class includes Amina, Max, Sebastian and Azhael.
For this championship, the site is Elvira Elementary in the Sunnyside School District, rather than Indianapolis or Phoenix where the NCAA Div. I basketball Final Fours will be played this weekend.
On this cloudy Wednesday morning in King’s class, 23 competitors have Chromebooks open on their desks. Small fingers hover over black keys.
This tipoff is instead a whiteboard timer counting down from 60 seconds.
Furious key tapping replaces roaring crowds in the stands.
“Click. Click. Tap.”
“Ack.”
“Whoaaaaaaaa.”
Sighing and foot shuffling punctuate the focus.
The championship and consolation rounds of March (math) Madness are ON.
The game: Solve the most multiplication problems — 1s through 12s, during three — tense — one-minute rounds.
Instead of a final buzzer, the timer hits zero. Laptops lock.
The whiteboard reveals the winner: Amina Borquez looks up and around at the class. No one is certain.
But the 9 year old — who solved 133 problems over the three minutes and 767 over the last three weeks of math madness — smiles.
Three rows behind Amina, Azhael Medina hangs his head. It was close. He had 99 correct answers over three minutes on Wednesday. As the runner-up, his nearly three-week total was 731.
“With all this, what we’re doing is our way of getting our kids to have pride in academics. You can do that through athletics and other avenues,” King said, adding his goal is fluency, meaning “accuracy plus speed.”
“But for this, it just matches up with the tournament,” he said. “I love to build friendly competition.”
As the Elvira basketball coach, King lines up his math madness brackets to coincide with the NCAA Tournaments. That hardwood action captures the attention of fans and casual watchers, especially in Tucson this year where the Pima Community College women’s basketball team just won a national title, the Intercollegiate National Wheelchair Basketball tournaments are being played at McKale Center and the University of Arizona men’s team advanced to a Final Four for the first time in a quarter-century.
“He’s tying the love of the game to the love of his content,” Elvira Principal Kelley Brooks-Cavaletto said.
Amina appreciates the connection, she says, although she only plays basketball sometimes at recess.
“I like how it’s a competition and it’s competitive,” she said. “But at the end everyone’s a winner.”
King updates the bracket hanging on his classroom door, Amina spins around, her long hair trailing her. He writes her name as the winner in the center of the bracket.
Talk turns to the NCAA men’s tournament.
“I like Michigan,” Sebastian Ortiz says.
Max Ochoa, 10, concurs. Azhael’s soccer jersey reveals his sports passion.
Back in the classroom, King confesses to being a basketball nerd. He will not watch the Final Four, preferring to refresh the boxscore and play-by-play on his phone. He can tell you how the UA men did in 1986 and extolls wisdom about point guard (and former pro baseball star) Kenny Lofton’s 1989 Sweet 16 play.
Teachers meeting students where they are, capturing the current cultural moment and incorporating that into the classroom can include the times tables of elementary math to using tournament data to build algorithms in high school.
King, who’s been teaching about 15 years, says his students hear about the multiplication challenge at the beginning of the school year and start their tourney just after spring break.
“Excitement with their own growth and fluency,” is what students get out of it, he says.
There’s also the joy of advancing to the next round.
“I love math. That’s my favorite subject,” Amina says. “I love the multiplication problems. Because at first I couldn’t do them and I was really bad at it, but when Mr. King taught me, I got really better at it.”
She also practiced at home. “I’d ask my brother. I’d write it down and then I’d ask him if it was correct,” she says, adding she wants to be a firefighter someday. “Well, and do math. I want to elevate myself so I can get smarter and help others. Wait, but I want to be a teacher too.”
For the moment, Amina says she will cheer for Arizona this weekend. Max and Sebastian discuss UA’s opponent, Michigan. Then, the four reflect on their own tourney.
“Well, at least I did what Duke couldn’t do,” Sebastian says. “I went to the Final Four!”
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