Athens High School senior Scott Fenton uses both sides of his brain equally well.

He is a musician skilled at playing the flugelhorn, alto and tenor saxophones, bass clarinet and piano but he has also been known to enjoy mathematics.

“I liked trigonometry,” Fenton said. “It was as fun as a school class can get, but I didn’t like algebra.”

The 17-year-old enjoys the kind of critical writing required in movie reviews but has also been writing fiction since he was in the sixth grade.

He was sitting in anatomy class Tuesday when Principal Chris Bolen and Counselor Susan Wales told him he had received a letter of commendation from the National Merit Scholarship Program for placing among the top 5 percent of more than 1.5 million students who entered the 2009 competition.

Although he was not selected as a semifinalist, which would have allowed him a chance to win a National Merit Scholarship, he is pleased to be one of about 34,000 commended students by scoring high on the preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test.

“I will not get a scholarship but it might look good on a resume,” he said pragmatically.

His secret to being a good student is getting the work done.

“I don’t study every day and I am not really organized, I just sort of know where things are,” he said. “But, I have self-motivation to get things done. Learning comes easy to an extent, so I don’t study all the time, but I don’t go into a test unprepared.”

Although he hasn’t decided on a university, he said he likes Samford University in Birmingham and the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, which he visited Monday. His brother, Sean, is studying accounting at Auburn University. His father, Jeff, works for the Tennessee Valley Authority, and his mother, Stephanie, works at Dynetics weapons research and development in Huntsville.

“I’d like to study English and I want to be a teacher of some kind,” Fenton said.

He is also a member of Beta Club, National Honor Society and Latin Club.

“I took Latin last year because I had to have a foreign language credit, and I thought it could help me understand more about the derivation of words,” he explained. “Plus everybody else took Spanish and French, and Latin was new.”

By midafternoon Tuesday, Fenton had not yet told his parents about his commendation letter. He figured he’d tell them when he got home.