ABSTRACT
Imagine yourself, a 15-year-old in the process of completing your second year in high-school, and one of six young women in a class of sixteen advanced-level mathematics students. One day a brochure for something called ‘SummerMath’ arrives in the mail. Looking through it, first at the pictures, you find these images:
• three young women measuring a slab of rock; • two students discussing what appears on a computer screen; • two students (one with her shoes off) studying next to a blackboard; • two students putting a robot together; • a basketball court with a hard-driving woman dribbling toward the hoop; • women together on a mountain top; • four young women in a canoe; and • two students intently at work in a laboratory
Jumping out at you from the brochure appear these words from a former student: ‘I learned to think “why” and “how” and not just to do as I’ve always been told. I only wish I had asked those questions of my teachers in high-school-but I will when I enter Mount Holyoke’. Juxtapose these words with what you heard from your teacher in school today ‘Just do it!’. Also staring you in the face are the words, ‘an opportunity for young women’.
