Battling the Epidemic

On Tuesday, I will be sending home a permission slip for your kids to be allowed to watch a movie called Hidden Figures on Tuesday, November 21--the day before Thanksgiving. I have to send home a permission slip because it is rated PG instead of G. Still, I want to show this on the day before Thanksgiving for a few reasons.

The first is that we have studied space and the space program pretty extensively during the first quarter of the school year. This movie is about the women who were swept under the rug during the early days of NASA due to the fact that they were not only African American, but they were (and are) African American women.

I assure you that, while this movie doesn't go beyond the "D-word" or the "H-word", it does go a long way toward showing the inequality shown toward people in the 1960's. What's more is that it really shows that it is not only okay, but awesome for girls and women to be good at Math.

These women proved their place among Hypatia of Alexandria, Mary Cartwright, Grace Hopper, and Madame Marie Curie in the world of female mathematicians. Actually, they proved their place among all mathematicians of both genders. It's a shame they haven't been recognized until now, but thank goodness they now have.

On September 22, NASA opened the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility, named after one of the real-life people in this movie.

We should all be thankful for not only the fact that we live in a world where everyone is important, but where everyone can be recognized for their contributions. And we live in a world where it is no longer uncool to be intelligent and to make use of that intelligence in making the world a better place, or at least a more educated place. It wasn't always that way.

Thank goodness for that.