MANILA, Philippines — The only numbers that set them far apart are their ages, but everything else about numbers — odd or even — brings them together.
Dr. Evangeline Bautista, 42; Fortunato Tacuboy III, 30, and Stephanie Anne Oliveros, 16, are math wizards keeping excellence alive in the much-feared subject.
They are buoyed by intricate number equations and thrive in nail-biting competitions, reaping scores of medals for their ability to come up with the answers to complicated questions in a flash.
“Math can be difficult but there are people who have some kind of an innate understanding of the subject,” Bautista told the Philippine Daily Inquirer in an interview, looking at Oliveros, who sat by her, to stress her point.
Oliveros, a senior student at Philippine Science High School (PSHS), was the champion in the recent Philippine Math Olympiad (PMO), taking home the gold medal and P15,000 in cash.
Her coach, Tacuboy, a two-time PMO winner in the early 1990s under the tutelage of Bautista, received P5,000 and a certificate.
Int’l Math Olympiad
The feat has also given the Oliveros-Tacuboy team the chance to join the annual International Math Olympiad in Spain in July.
Bautista, a professor at the Ateneo de Manila University, should be very proud, having produced a fine coach like herself. But she said she was not an expert in math during her college days. (She is now the director of the PMO, the oldest and most prestigious nationwide math contest among high school students.)
“I was OK in math. I never excelled, not in my college life. It is my regret that my high school was not really very active in math competitions so I never got to experience [joining one],” she said.
A BS Math graduate from the University of the Philippines, Bautista started her 10-year coaching stint after she landed a teaching job at PSHS in 1989 — an opportunity that helped her hone her math skills and develop her interest in competitions.
Humbling experience
But coaching a team of math geniuses was a constant humbling experience and a struggle of learning and practice — a wisdom that Tacuboy would later learn from her.
“To be honest, these students were better than me. It was a matter of keeping up with them, working hard enough to be able to train them,” Bautista said.
“You are forced to study and improve in order to keep up with your students. You can’t afford to be on the weak side,” she said.
Long hours
The long hours of training she gave her students after classes or even on weekends were almost always extensive given the “limited” math lessons they had in class.
Bautista pointed out that what was taught in the classroom was not always enough to bring her students to international competitions.
To cope with the poor resources for training, such as books and reviewers, Bautista remembered painstakingly scribbling down all the questions that came out in each competition she attended and compiling this heap for her students to use.
The birth pains of creating champions — the arduous studying and “learning with her students” — almost made it difficult for her to accept defeat, especially the first time around.
Losing, crying
Her very first PMO attendance wasn’t exactly a remarkable day for her. She remembered crying her heart out in her car after her team, which she had so much faith in, lost.
“I was really disappointed but you just keep on working at it until eventually you start winning. But it is still not something that you can consistently win,” she said.
Creating winners could sometimes be just a matter of good luck in terms of finding the best students to train and of getting the kind of questions during the contest, Bautista said.
But it was easy to spot them, the “mathematically matured” like Tacuboy, in a class of equally talented students.
Bautista said these students were not particularly the “valedictorian type.” They rarely spoke in class and took down notes, but they listened well and were fast and sharp enough to give the correct answers to a problem.
“You will also see them even in the way they answer questions in an exam because most of the time they do not stick with the conventional method. They’ve their own system of solving problems,” she said.
Defining moment
As for Tacuboy, his defining moment as a math champion was the inter-section contest he joined in his sophomore year at PSHS. He bested all those who were known to excel in the subject.
The valedictorian from Cagayan province wasn’t exactly the kind of student who was known for his math skills in his high school class.
In grade school, he was the known topnotcher in Social Science contests, but he already had interest in numbers even then, he said.
After winning in the math contest at PSHS, which had prompted Bautista to invite him to train with her, Tacuboy resolved to shine in the subject.
He garnered 12 medals in math tournaments in the country, two of them in the PMO, from 1992 to 1994. (Bautista considered this period one of the highest moments of her coaching stint.)
Parents’ wish
Tacuboy graduated from PSHS with only one love — math. But his parents wanted him to have a title appended to his name so he was prodded to abandon his plan to take up BS Math at UP. He took up an engineering course, instead.
Not wanting to disappoint his parents, he gave in to their desire but took up a masteral degree in BS Applied Math after he graduated from the UP College of Engineering.
“At first, my parents didn’t want me to take up Math because they did not want me to become a teacher, but I did become one,” he said with a chuckle.
When he reentered PSHS in 2004 as a teacher, he was assigned to coach the freshman team, where Oliveros was a member. He has remained a coach.
But being a tutor to a math genius like Oliveros, who has won 22 medals in local competitions and six in international tournaments in a span of four years, was not a cakewalk, Tacuboy said.
While keeping up with his regular teaching load, he has to make extra effort to come to the training prepared. Every waking hour he has spent on solving challenging problems, he said. But there were really times that he would founder.
Give-and-take process
“When that happens, I tell them that I do not know how to solve a particular problem and I let them answer it instead,” he said, noting that coaching was always a two-way, give-and-take process.
He did not dare pretend to his brilliant students that he knew how to solve a taxing problem when he couldn’t because the students would eventually spot his errors.
“It holds true for any trainer. We just look like we’re better than our students because we have more experience but they could be better than us,” Tacuboy said.
Nevertheless, his shortcomings did not prevent him from giving his students very complicated problems.
His student, Oliveros, was no longer a stranger to the rigors of the training. When Tacuboy was being “ruthless,” she understood why.
Competitor since Grade 2
The 16-year-old student has been a consistent competitor since Grade 2 and has attended regularly the Mathematics Trainers’ Guild, a local institute that trains elementary and high school students for international competitions.
She also represented the country in many math tilts across the world—in Thailand, Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore, China and the United States.
Her recent trip was in Vietnam, where she represented the country at the 2007 International Math Olympiad.
“I really push myself to win because there are people expecting something from me and I expect something from myself also,” she said.
In her elementary years at De La Salle-Zobel, Oliveros had won in 16 local and in 8 international math contests
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