St. Joseph senior shines in Utah State Math contest

Friday, Jun. 03, 2016

OGDEN — St. Joseph Catholic High School senior Sean Letendre placed fifth in the 2016 Utah State Math contest.

He was the only Catholic school student to place higher than eighth in any of the categories, which were separated by grade, from 7th to 12th.

Letendre also was a member of the St. Joseph teams that won the Division 1A Math competition for the past three years.

“Math doesn’t come as easy to me as it does for some other people, but I am really interested in math so I study it to where it becomes easy; math is my passion,” Letendre said. 

“Sean is exactly what we want from the St. Joseph students’ perspective; he is the epitome of what we want going out into the world and showing what St. Joseph is all about,” said Clay Jones, principal. “He exhibits the charisms of the school, the academics, and he has a humble demeanor about him. He has achieved authority at a very young age; I have been nothing but impressed with him.”

The St. Joseph Class of 2016 salutatorian, Letendre has signed a letter of intent to attend Georgetown University in the fall and plans to major in mathematics. He already has completed college-level courses in algebra and multi-variable calculus.

While Latendre’s math teacher, Monika Serbinowska, was on a medical leave for three weeks, she was confident her class was in good hands because “in the presence of a substitute teacher, Sean was teaching calculus to AP math students,” she said. “It was incredibly comforting for me to know that Sean would explain everything to them; he is about two or three years ahead of his peers. He looks up on Google for a description of new ideas and topics for me to teach and problems to learn on his own.” 

Letendre was also one of the “best history students in the school and at the same time he is just extremely humble and willing to tutor others,” Serbinowska said. “I think that comes from an extremely strong foundation; he is quiet, he’s not shy, he knows exactly what he needs to do. We at St. Joseph really encourage students to help each other.” 

Letendre returns the compliments.

“The math teachers at St. Joseph teach the topics very thoroughly and they present a lot of problems that make us think differently; they give us challenging problems that can’t be solved by one method based on memorized formulas, but require reasoning and synthesized logic,” said Letendre, who also attended St. Joseph Elementary School. “I’ve always been interested in math.” 

A computer programming class was started this year at SJCHS and Letendre “immediately showed aptitude in the subject and has gone on to study it; learning mathematics is really important to computer programming; there is a lot of overlap there,” said Kevin Fendrick, SJCHS math teacher. “He has a lot of talent in many different fields.” 

One way Letendre puts his talents to good use is by bridging “this seemingly gap between what it is to engage in the faith and what it means to have a science, technology engineering and math (STEM) mind,” said Thomas Tulp, SJCHS theology teacher. 

Letendre was among the SJCHS students who in March attended the presentation at Juan Diego CHS by Brother Guy Consolmagno, the Vatican astronomer, who spoke about science and religion. 

“Brother Guy had very interesting things to say about the universe and his work in science and astronomy over the past few decades,” said Letendre. “I was inspired to see someone find God in science in places that most people don’t think of in science. His work inspired me to continue growing in my faith and to couple the two fields together.” 

Letendre chose to attend Georgetown University because its community “is interested in a wide variety of topics, more so than other schools I looked in to that were mostly focused around engineering; there I can study math and also be part of a religious community and study with people from around the world,” he said.