Kenneth White Jr. High student, Fredy Cortes, has walked away with the top honor in the Texas Math and Science Coaches Association (TMSCA) competition. He took the State title in the category of 7th grade Calculators.
“I was happy, and I felt relieved because last year I got second. This year I finally did it,” states Cortes. “My teammates were proud of me, and I was proud of myself too. It is definitely a great memory in my life. I have already set my goal for next year. That goal is to get a better score and to win it again!”
Cortes is a well-rounded student that maintains an “A” average in all his classes and stays active in chess, basketball, tennis, cross country, conjunto, UIL and Destination Imagination. He also puts in about 5 to 6 hours of practice a week in order to compete in TMSCA Calculators.
“Fredy is a super hard worker; he knows how to focus and is very well-rounded. I was really happy to see him win State for Calculators,” states Adrian Chapa, KWJH Calculators coach. “He got off to a great start and did very well last year when he placed second at State and lost the top spot by one problem. So, this year he worked super hard and left no doubt. He won by a very significant margin.”
The Calculators event is broken into two parts called number crunchers and word problems. The number crunchers are long math equations that must be solved with a calculator. Competitors have to master the work of operations and the sequence to solve it. The word problems include 22 story and geometry problems that involve high school math like Algebra I & II along with Geometry. A perfect score in Calculators is a 400 and Fredy got a 382 with only missing 2 questions out of 80.
According to Fredy, he states that anyone interested in TMSCA should definitely try it. He says that it may be hard at the beginning but with practice and lots of work it will get easier.
“Don’t think of it as it is going to be hard that you’re not going to do good or that you’re going to fail. Think of it as a challenge that you have to take on and to tell yourself that if I succeed then I succeed but if I don’t then I don’t too bad I will try again until I succeed,” states Cortes.
For anyone interested in joining TMSCA at KWJH or for more information just reach out to Coach Adrian Chapa at (956)323-3600.