Girls really do have an appetite for math and science
he slimy tofu-like organ in the hands of a University of Utah researcher wasn’t the first human brain 15-year-old Chelsea O’Crowley had ever seen.It was just the first brain she had ever actually touched.”It was surprising,” O’Crowley, a ninth-grader at Monticello Academy in West Valley City, said Saturday of the three-pound brain an anonymous benefactor had donated to science.”It doesn’t feel like our heads are that heavy. You’d think you’d get a headache all the time” with that much weight inside your cranium, she said.O’Crowley was among 450 teenage girls attending a science and mathematics conference in Salt Lake City sponsored by ATK Aerospace Systems, which develops and tests rockets and rocket engines in northern Utah.ATK has held science and math conferences in Ogden for girls in sixth through 12th grades for nine years. The conferences, however, have become so popular, that the company felt it needed to also hold similar symposiums in Salt Lake City.”In our field, we want to see an increase in women who work on rockets,” ATK spokeswoman Trina Patterson said.”Nationally, it’s been shown that, starting around sixth grade, girls start to lose interest in science, technology, engineering and math fields. We want to ignite that spark so that they can see these fields are exciting and challenging and anyone can do it,” Patterson said.
The conference “kind of changes the paradigm that it’sAdvertisement
not a man’s world and we are not geeks,” said Angela Trego, director of engineering at ATK.”I have a Ph.D., but I am not a geek,” Trego said.O’Crowley aims to be a neurosurgeon when she grows up. She thinks removing brain tumors and other neurological procedures is “cool.” She also knows she is smart enough to master four years of medical school and up to eight years of internships and residencies “if I try.”But even though more women than men attend U.S. colleges and universities, many shy away from math and science-based careers, said Rod Goode, principal of Northwest Middle School, where the conference was held.”We don’t believe that they have the aptitude to excel in the sciences and math, and we are completely wrong,” Goode said.There are lots of theories to explain the withering of interest, such as the perception that work involving science and math is men’s work. Or, elementary school teachers are afraid of mathematics, and their unease rubs off on female students.Many students, male and female, take perverse pride in claiming they aren’t smart enough or don’t have the aptitude — a perspective that galls Joleigh Honey, the mathematics supervisor for the Salt Lake City School District.”I don’t believe you are born intelligent. It’s something you become if things are [structured and nurtured] in the right way,” Honey said.Sometimes, it’s simply that girls become distracted by clothes and hairstyles and how they appear to others. Social pressure is a big deal, said Darian Luna, 13, an eighth-grader enrolled in ninth-grade algebra.”I’ve just always been good at it,” she said. “I like working with numbers. They make sense, just the way they all fit.”