Innocent fib lands Ottawa teacher in media spotlight for drawing perfect circles

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OTTAWA – Alexander Overwijk has been telling his students for years that he’s the World Freehand Circle Drawing Champion.

It started out as a joke, something to catch the attention of the kids in his high school math class and keep them interested.

“I started telling the story in 1996,” says Overwijk, who heads the math department at Glebe Collegiate in Ottawa.

The only thing that was true was Overwijk’s ability to draw a perfect circle in less than one second, by pivoting his elbow and using a piece of chalk.

But after one of his students recorded a video of Overwijk drawing a circle on a clean chalk board in 2007, a new reality took hold.

The video was posted on YouTube, garnering hundreds of thousands of hits in just a few days. Then other websites picked it up.

“Post-video, I actually held a championship that I won,” Overwijk said in an interview.

Because of the attention brought by the initial video, he and some others decided to host a circle-drawing championship at a local pub to raise money for cancer research.

Since then he’s been written about, spoken at an art festival in Switzerland, performed for Japanese TV and received millions of online hits.

Now, five years after the video went viral, the Ottawa teacher’s innocent fib — and his unique drawing ability — have landed him a segment of an American TV network show.

The video of Overwijk drawing a circle for his math students caught the attention of producers of NBC’s The Today Show, who asked him to show off his talents on Friday’s show.

The fame hasn’t gone to his head. He still teaches, still draws circles for his students. But the notoriety hasn’t gone unnoticed by the new batches of young students he teaches each year.

“The kids love the story,” he said.

“I’ve always had a pretty good connection with the kids, but this just adds to that.”

Overwijk isn’t the only person who has shown off freehand circle-drawing talents online.

There’s a video of another unidentified teacher, and one of a student, doing the same thing.

Yet those videos have been viewed by many fewer than the 6.5 million hits on Overwijk’s front-of-class performance on YouTube alone.

Whatever the reason, Overwijk says he’s amazed by the attention he has received and how the Internet can propel events.

“Thirty years ago it might have been a funny local story if someone got a hold if it,” he said.

“But with today’s day and age, it really shows the power of social media.”

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On the web: youtube.com/watch?v=eAhfZUZiwSE

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