A Numbers Game

How mixing math and basketball became a winning combination for some Toronto students

- Micah Toub

SOMETIMES ONE PLUS one does equal three, as was the case when Dave McNee met Claudia Mandekic 14 years ago. McNee, then 27, was at a dentist appointment in Toronto when he started chatting with Mandekic, 30, who was working the front desk there while studying to be a teacher. When she told McNee how hard it could be to get students excited about math, her favourite discipline, he made a surprising suggestion: "Why not throw in something they enjoy, like sports?"

The idea of mixing basketball and mathematics got its first shot a couple years later, in 2011, when the now colleagues who had launched a tutoring non-profit-were invited to run a summer-school program for kids who'd failed Grade 9 math at Georges Vanier Secondary School.

When the students showed up for their first day, they weren't exactly thrilled, says Mandekic. Over the next few hours, she and McNee gave the kids techniques to improve their shooting while also helping them calculate their field-goal percentage which, in turn, taught them about fractions and decimal points.