Sixth-Graders Cream Teachers on Pi Day [Video]

With their classmates cheering them on and big grins plastered on their faces, three West Deptford sixth-graders smashed a whipped cream pie in the principal and two teachers’ faces Thursday, all in the name of math.

March 14 is Pi Day, a day to celebrate the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the diameter. As that sounds like a celebration only a mathematician could love, West Deptford Middle School found many ways to elevate 3.14 (pi) to new levels of fun.

The sixth-grade class’s entire day revolved around the marvel of pi, culminating in pie-throwing privileges for the students who could recite the most digits of pi—a number that never ends.

“It’s a whole day of cross-curricular activities,” said math teacher Laura Sandy, who helped organize the day. “In social studies, they had a historical scavenger hunt for facts about pi. In language arts, they wrote pi-kus instead of haikus.”

Sixth-graders also read a book on pi, decorated their homeroom doors to mark Pi Day and held a costume contest to dress up as Archimedes, the Greek mathematician who approximated pi, and Albert Einstein, who was born 134 years ago on Pi Day.

The whole sixth-grade team of teachers made sure the students were well-versed in all things pi by day’s end, Sandy said.

But it’s fair to say the kids were eagerly anticipating the end of Pi Day, when they would find out who got to cream their teachers with a pie.

Coming in third was Nicole MacAdams, who recited 110 digits of pi for the honor of pie’ing math teacher Donald Wernig. With 117 digits of pi under his belt, Jonas Cameron got to smash a pie in Sandy’s face.

And then there was the big winner. Jarrah Barquero recited a whopping 164 digits of pi, reeled back her arm and let a pie fly into principal Michael Fanelli’s face.

“You don’t really want to do this, do you?” Fanelli, clad in a swim cap and plastic poncho, asked Jarrah as he approached his pie chair. With the entire sixth grade chanting her name, Jarrah just grinned and took aim.

Click on the video above to watch Sandy, Wernig and Fanelli get pie’d, and on the photos to see scenes from the middle school's Pi Day.

The top winners of the costume contest, who took home $3.14 each:

TJ Hoyt

Frank Harold

Desmond Shaffer

Ben Smith

The sixth-grade teaching team who organized Pi Day:

Jacklyn Argo

Bridgette Breece

Richard Cottone

Jeff Christo

Rebecca Headley

Nicole Hopkins

Lynette Lindia

Lynn MacLuski

Joan Pacini

Wendy Rooney

Maureen Rullo

Laura Sandy

Kristin Sincavage

Donald Wernig