Through my i-search paper for Secondary Curriculum and Instruction, I think that I built an important ally. My topic of exploration was looking at how working professionals actually use mathematics in their workplace. As I thought about who I wanted to contact, medical and business applications came to mind and both of the individuals who I talked to were more than willing to help me out and were interested in what I was trying to look at. I found a great book called "She Does Math!" which details real-life math that female working professionals do. Many of the problems had to do with engineering, but I didn't think I knew any engineers to contact. Suddenly I recalled a new teacher at my former high school who my mother (who is an administrator at said high school) told me about.
Her name is Gail Anderson and she worked in aerospace engineering prior to obtaining her teaching license just a few years ago. Not only did she understand my quest to find out how math is used in the real-world, it is also something that she strives to incorporate into her teaching. She assigns a paper to her students asking them to explore this topic on their own and she actually requested to add my i-search paper to her body of resources to share with her students.
I certainly hope to use her as a resource again and perhaps I will have the chance to observe her classes sometime when I visit home.
This topic might be considered to be a bit silly, but it is something that is actually quite important to me. And that topic is clothing. Now, I'm not one to spend hours in the morning picking out my clothes for the day or even one who enjoys shopping. The reason that I think clothes are important is because whether they should or not, clothes say a lot about a person. We all tend to make a lot of snap judgments about people, based on their general appearance, of which clothes are certainly a part. In fact, I was just reading something today on this very issue at feministing.com We see a hot women on the street, for example, and automatically assume she has a great, easy life, a loving partner, a successful career--all because her hair is shiny and straight and she wears a size two! The reverse effect is ever-present these days; when a woman is overweight or doesn't fit the conventional standard of beauty in some other way, we assume all sorts of completely unrelated thing about her--she's lazy, unhappy, untalented, unloved.
At my field placements this year at both Goshen High School and Goshen Middle School, I have been struck by the way in which girls dress. Now I'm not one to tell other people how to dress, but particularly this semester, I have been very conscious of the way that I dress when I go to the high school. My goals are 1) to be professional 2) to dress attractively without showing a lot of skin or wearing skin-tight items of clothing. I think that the media tells young girls that the only way for them to be considered attractive is for them to wear a skin-tight shirt or a dress that is far too short to be considered a dress. I don't know if any of them ever think about it, but I figure my goals aren't bad ones and I happen to be an influence, well then all the better.
Her name is Gail Anderson and she worked in aerospace engineering prior to obtaining her teaching license just a few years ago. Not only did she understand my quest to find out how math is used in the real-world, it is also something that she strives to incorporate into her teaching. She assigns a paper to her students asking them to explore this topic on their own and she actually requested to add my i-search paper to her body of resources to share with her students.