Geddry’s numbers among best at Iola High

You can be forgiven if the thought of a second-degree polynomial equation doesn’t immediately make you want to burst into song.

But then you aren’t Sloan Geddry. “First of all,” confessed the Iola senior. “I love graphs. Which is weird. Most people hate graphs. Plus, I do have a favorite equation, which is the quadratic equation, and there’s a song that goes with it.”

“A song?”

“You know, a little tune to help you remember it.”

Here it is — sung by Geddry — to the tune of “Pop! Goes the Weasel”:

“x is equal to negative-b

Plus or minus the square root

b-squared minus 4ac

All over 2a”

And here it is in its less tuneful expression: x = [-b ± ?(b2 – 4ac)]/2a

“It’s for when you’re trying to find x-intercepts,” explained Geddry, in a conversation last week with the Register. “Usually you try to factor an equation, and if you can’t factor it, you have to use that.”

“Huh?” I asked.

“It’s for a parabola. So, if you were to launch a rocket — you know how it goes up then comes down? That’s the parabola.” So, now, if you wanted to find the x-intercept of the rocket’s path through the sky, continued Geddry, then you could apply this little ditty.

GEDDRY (pronounced JED-ree), one of this year’s valedictorians, will attend Pittsburg State University in the fall, where she’ll major in math. “Here’s a fun fact,” said the bubbly teen, “I was the only incoming freshman to get a scholarship from the [PSU] math department.” Pitt State recently invited Geddry to attend a scholarship banquet on campus. Geddry had assumed the event was for incoming freshmen but, when she arrived, the place was crammed with confident undergraduates and even a few grad students. “When we went up to get our awards,” recalled Geddry, “they wanted us to name our favorite math class. Everybody was saying these intricate college math-class names that I’ve never heard of in my life. So then, when I went up there, I said, ‘Well, I’m only an incoming freshman, so I have not taken any of your crazy classes yet.’”

But she will take their crazy classes, in time. She’ll have to. Geddry’s chosen career? Statistician.

BUT STATISTICS

wasn’t always Geddry’s main ambition. She had much furrier inclinations at one time. “I used to be so set on becoming a veterinarian,” said Geddry. “I was going to go to K-State. Even before I entered high school, I had all of my classes planned out.” But at some point during her 10th-grade year, she decided she wasn’t cut out for vet work. “I do have a love and a passion for animals, but I would have to make the hard choices about when to put them down, and I would have to tell the families. That’s just not something I want to do.”

This sudden career detour — nothing to sweat if you’re one of life’s average students — had the discombobulating effect of sparking a mild existential shock in the hyper-driven Geddry. “I was only a sophomore,” she recalled, “but now I was totally freaking out about what I was going to do with my future.” In truth, there is probably, inside every straight-A student, every valedictorian — in fact, inside every citizen of the perfectionist class — a small hobgoblin of worry pacing the floorboards of the mind, chewing its nails at the prospect of a B. “So I needed help, quick,” said Geddry, who managed to find that counsel in Mrs. Johns, Iola’s gifted instructor. “We sat down together and went over my passions…and we looked at various career options and looked at where demand for certain jobs was high, and we came up with statistician.”

BUT IT’S NOT, in the main, some airless or mechanical pursuit of the perfect that drives Geddry’s academic success. She has to be as good as she is. According to Geddry, her main drive comes from her being, as she puts it, a “first-generation” college-bound student — meaning the first member of her family to potentially graduate from an institution of higher learning. She’s known for a long time that if she wants a college education, she’s going to have to fight for it. “My family is a low-income family, so the only way that I’ll be able to pay for college is if I work hard in order to afford it.”

AND WORK HARD she has. Besides hitting the books, this high-flying senior works as an office aid in the high school; she volunteers for the college-prep program, Upward Bound; she works for SAFE BASE, the district’s popular after-school program; and she is an active member of the Rotary Club and is the vice president of Interact, that club’s youth wing.

Asked what she will miss most about Iola as she begins this next chapter in her life, Geddry doesn’t pause. “The Rotary Club! I love those guys to death.” She pointed to two local members in particular, Judy Works and Stan Grigsby. “They know I’m a first-generation student and they have encouraged me so much. They’re amazing.”

“WILL YOU be working over the summer?” I asked Geddry. “To save money for college.”

“There’s an Upward Bound summer program, so I have to stick around Iola,” she said. “So I’m actually looking for a summer job. You can put that in your article — ‘She is looking for a job.’” Geddry laughed. “I’m hoping for a business job, answering phones maybe, something where I can interact with people, if you want to put that in there too. But it’s already May, so I’m starting to get a little worried. You don’t really have to put that in the story, if you don’t want to.”