Where is Mrs. Nadel? Mrs. Nadel was my High School algebra teacher. She looked and acted like a 50 year-old High School algebra teacher during the early 1970s. She was short, slightly plump, warm and sensitive to the adolescent insecurities of her students without being gushy or overbearing. In many ways she was an ideal teacher: she never complained about what her students were wearing, didn't appear to make any judgments based on external factors, all she cared about was that when you were in her class you were learning algebra and not distracting the other students from also learning algebra. I had plenty of 50 year old female teachers during my student years. Most of them had started teaching during World War II when men were drafted into the war and women were encouraged to go into the workplace to keep our country running; but Betty Friedan tells that story better than I can. It never occurred to me that having an excellent female algebra teacher was something out of the ordinary. I never knew very much about Mrs. Nadel: what her husband was like or how many children she had.... I just always assumed that she had one part of her earlier life that was somewhat unusual (maybe she had traveled to Europe in her late twenties and been a participant in some scientific or artistic movement), and that under that middle class, educated but non-snooty exterior she was secretly a lot hipper than she looked. All this was long before Barbie had ever uttered those crippling words ("Math is hard"), but the academic shift still happened between elementary school and high school. Here's the quick over-simplification: Boys in elementary school were learning the lesson that if they always did what they were told, they would be labeled "sissies" or "momma's boys" and shunned by their peers (during this same period when good girls were more consistently rewarded by both their friends and guardians for being obedient). Part of being a boy meant disregarding female authority hence, not paying attention to female elementary school teachers hence getting lower grades. What about me? I was smart and in category 1 and 3. I was somewhat slow socially. By that I mean that observing peer behavior and copying it did not come naturally to me ("if Sally jumped off a bridge..."). I expected to be told what the rules were, not to have to figure them out by identifying commonalities in the endless possibilities of human behavior. And if the rules didn't make sense, I expected to be able to debate them logically. This worked out pretty well until I was in 5th grade in a class with more upper-class children who were much more fashion-conscious and conforming-behavior-conscious. I had a pretty lousy 5th and 6th grade. I was picked on. Of course my mother (who shopped for my clothes) didn't understand the social pressures that I was experiencing and didn't understand that it wasn't my fault (I was her oldest). So, when I was approaching Junior High School (7th grade), I was determined to learn what it was I didn't know and I read 2 or 3 books about etiquette and fashion for teenage girls (some of the etiquette books in the late 1960s contained very conservative ideas about feminine behavior), and subscribed to a teenage girls' fashion magazine. It worked. It kept me from being picked on in Junior High School, but it also pulled down some of my grades, because I needed to focus more on what I was wearing, what other girls were wearing, and social behavior. By ninth grade, lucky for me, the world was changing. Now that I was no longer in danger of being picked on, I was free to decide that many of those rules of etiquette were dumb, that paying lots of attention to fashion was dumb (unless it was your life's calling), and I devoured the newly available books on feminism. By High School if anyone told me that my behavior was "unlady-like" I laughed in his/her face. This is how I know that girls intentionally get dumber in High School. As I was shifting into being a feminist I remember many of my girlfriends (almost all of whom are feminists now) telling me that boys weren't going to change and that boys preferred girls who didn't get more attention/praise/acknowledgements than they did in the areas of academics, sports, or special talents (unless the talents were considered strictly "feminine" like cooking). In High School, these girls didn't apply themselves as hard as they did in elementary school when getting good grades was "being good" for Mommy and Daddy. But for me, the game had shifted. I was now a feminist. I knew I wanted to spend a significant portion of my life supporting myself (so that I would have autonomy) and I wanted my options to be varied. That meant getting good grades. Getting good grades had become difficult in an unexpected way: history seemed to be all about men (how dull, doesn't have anything to do with me), even in my beloved English literature, the stories now had male protagonists, and the female characters were one-dimensional. I forced my eyelids open as I studied for those tests. Ah, but math, ALGEBRA, now that was a liberating subject! And there was Mrs. Nadel, 50ish, short, slightly plump, middle-class, and a brilliant teacher. She made it simple. Surely anyone who believed she could do well in math, who paid attention and was willing to take the time to follow the concepts and get them fixed in her mind could do well under her tutelage. What I didn't know was that Mrs. Nadel was also the faculty supervisor for the "Math Team". She invited me to spend my lunch hour a couple of days a week in her Math classroom with other students who enjoyed doing algebra puzzles. It sounded strange to me, but I was curious so I took my lunch to her classroom. I was surprised that there were more males than females ( I was still mentally expecting to see good girls paying attention and performing better in school) but I met a close female friend there, and we shared a desk together. It was exciting. Mrs. Nadel would give us a problem and we had to invent a way to solve it. We were permitted to ask questions. Usually Mrs. Nadel would answer the questions but sometimes she would say "I'm not supposed to answer that one." Then we knew we were getting close to knowing enough to answer the question. When we thought we knew the answer we would raise our hand. Mrs. Nadel would come over to our desk and look at our work. If we were right, she would say, "Great, you've got it! Let's give the other students some more time." We would wait until enough students had gotten correct answers (or for a time limit) and then Mrs. Nadel would go over the solution on the blackboard. We'd do this until the lunch break was over. We'd also be eating our lunch and chatting. It was a great social hour and somehow it also had the feeling of belonging to some special secret society. Roll was never taken. We were there at every meeting voluntarily. During regular Algebra class, I was encouraged to ask clarifying questions but not to give away answers so that the other students would have a chance to figure out the problems themselves. About half way through the term, Mrs. Nadel announced that she would be selecting students from our "Math Team" to compete with students from a neighboring school. It had never occurred to me that I was participating in a "Math Team" or that other schools had similar programs, or that we would be having competitions. I was selected as first alternate, and when one of the other students couldn't participate due to illness, I took his place. Our Math Team won that competition (and I scored a few of the points). I never heard of any other competitions. I don't know what happened to the program. I had so much fun on the Math Team that I chose to stay after normal school hours to take a new elective, available only to math honors students: "Computer Math". I was again surprised that there weren't many females in the class, but this was long before personal computers existed and computers were often thought of as "dehumanizing" by people who idealized a simpler life. We had a young, handsome male teacher who taught us computer programming logic and Fortran IV. I enjoyed it thoroughly. I finished at the top of the class. I graduated High School and sometime later I heard that Mrs. Nadel had retired and moved to Florida. I think about Mrs. Nadel every time I read about how girls are performing in High School math "these days". I was so lucky to have her. Where is she when we need her now? |
||
 |
||
To email please see: contact.cgi if you have any comments or questions about this page. Authored & created by Meryll Larkin: 1/13/03 Updated: |
||
