This is an updated older blog post of mine from another site… With everyone at home watching movies….
In all my years of teaching I have had the hardest time showing a movie or clips in class. I’m a math teacher and technology teacher (now) — there hasn’t been movies that are about math/technology uplifting and appropriate. Until now — Hidden Figures…
I cannot say enough good stuff about this movie. I have my kids watch small sections and we discuss it. We had discussions about:
* The math Katherine was doing – without a calculator (as we know them)
* Sexism – are girls smart enough for this math (Paul made us mad)
* Racism and Jim Crow laws and discrimination in regards to all the education difficulties these ladies and their families faced
* Protesting, true respect and changing their world through Mary persistence going to engineering school, Dorothy’s goal to make her and the other West Computers indispensable to NASA and Katherine’s steadfastness to stay the course and work hard. —- “If you act right, your are right”
* Computers then (room-sized) and now (pocket-sized)
* The space race, communism and the Russians
* John Glenn and the other astronauts, NASA and the dress code
This movie also gives me the chance to encourage girls in class that enjoying math and science and in reverse for boys to be artistic. Just because something is the “norm” doesn’t mean it is the only way. It’s more important to be involved in something you love, because you don’t know what kind of difference you can make.
So I want to thank these women for being willing to follow their hearts (and their minds) to become a standard I want to live up to, to being a someone I want to grow up and be like in the face of huge heartaches, controversies and obstacles.
Teaching Re-Imagined 