Hidden Figures (biography)

Hidden Figures
By Margot Lee Shetterly

This book is about three African-American, mathematician, women, and their place in the space program. The charcters are Dorothy Vaughan (my maiden name), Mary Jackson, and Katherine Johnson, who all played a role in space flight with their mathematical abilities. They did this while fighting with segregation, prejudice, juggling work and families. They never really had the recognition until the book and movie, but they are an inspiration to every women, to every African American, and to the field of mathemetics. They were human calculators, and made it possible for space flight.

This book was published in 2016, and is considered a biography genre of text. This is a chapter book, with 23 chapters. It tells of the events, many details and historical accounts, of the lives of these three women. The book states that biographies " tells the story of the life (lives) or portion of life of a real person, or in this case people (Galda,2010)." The theme is that women made many contribution in space flight. The setting is in the 1940's at NASA, and is written in the third person point of view. I also feel that this book can be classified as non-fiction, biography, and historical fiction, based on our descriptions in the textbook(Galda, 2010).

The book cover is really the only illustrations, and it uses photographs as the technique, it is a black and white photos, placed on a blue background that has solar images or details surrounding it.

I actually chose this book, because I absolutely loved the story, not just because of the last name of one of the individauls, but because it is such a powerful message. That message is that women, African Americans, have had such an amazing impact on innovation and our history. I think one of the main things that I loved about this is that it shows women in the field of math, something that we all know has been lacking in this day in age. I feel that these women are such a great role model for young girls who are good at math...maybe we can get more girls involved in the ares of math, science, technology, and engineering.

This story can relate to Saint Leo's core value of respect. Many events in the story, many apsects touched on the segregation of the time period. Blacks and whites had separate bathroom, water fountains, drinking glasses or mugs in the book. These women helped in space flight, the put America in the lead, and yet the lack of respects from their coworkers was awful. They were intelligent, capable, and amazing women, who have historical relevance, which shows that no matter the color of your skin, the gender that you associate with, or whatever difference it may be, we are all deserving of respect, and capable of more than our appearances.

Some ideas for activities that incorporate biographies in the classroom would be, first, using an idea from the text, making a character scrapbook. Collect details about the characters, and make a scrapbook to include all three of the main charcters. This makes learning about these characters fun and creative. Another idea, also taken from the text is making the newspaper ad...breaking news, about how these "human calculators" helped in the "race to space (shettler,2010)."

Resources:

Galda, L., Cullinan, B. E., & Sipe, L. R. (2010). Literature and the child (7th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworths, Inc.

Shetterly, M. L. (2016). Hidden Figures. New York. William Morrow and Company Inc.