AURORA | Laura Stone was in her junior year in high school when a guidance counselor told her she wouldn’t need to take any more math classes.
She’d already had the required two years of math, he told her, and as a girl, there wouldn’t be much need for her to pursue any more training. He suggested choir classes instead.
“I took three periods of choir my junior and senior years of high school,” said Stone, 42, now a full-time math professor at the Community College of Aurora. Stone would have to wait until after she graduated from college to rediscover the joys and challenges of the discipline. “It wasn’t until I was in my late 20s that I substitute taught in a middle school classroom and thought, ‘This math stuff is cool.’”
Stone, who went on to receive a master’s degree in math education, said she doesn’t want to see another generation of female middle and high school students get stuck with the same discouraging message. It was part of the reason she signed up to teach workshops during the “Day of the Girl” event held Oct. 11 at CCA’s Lowry Campus in Denver. The daylong event connected about 60 female sixth, seventh and eighth graders from Aurora South Middle School and Aurora West College Preparatory Academy with workshops rooted in science, technology, engineering and math.
Groups of 20 middle schoolers revolved between classes detailing the inner workings of computers, the mechanics behind website design and the mathematics and statistics behind playing the lottery. Stone taught the statistics workshop, using colorful slides, a spinning prize wheel and basic lessons about fractional math to illustrate the unlikelihood of winning the big prize.
“Once I hit high school, there was a perception of, ‘Oh, you’re a girl, you won’t need (math). Hopefully there’s been a change,” said Stone. “I think there has been, because we have STEM education and we have things like this.”
The event at CCA was part of an international push to connect girls with STEM education, an effort that came in part from the United Nations. According to the campaign’s website, the purpose of the event is “to help galvanize worldwide enthusiasm for goals to better girls’ lives, providing an opportunity for them to show leadership and reach their full potential.” While CCA has hosted similar events for local middle and high school students in the past, signing up for the global “Day of the Girl” campaign offered more legitimacy. It also offered a way to directly reach the Aurora community.
“There are not enough women represented in these fields internationally, especially when you start looking at the computer field and engineering,” said Victor Vialpando, the dean of the CCA Lowry campus. “All of the STEM related programs are physically at Lowry — our computer department, our science department. The advantage for us is getting students exposed to our campus … The other, bigger concept is promoting higher education and college.”
It was a message that resonated with Leah Romero, 13. The eighth-grader from South had already attended the website design workshop led by Bob Woods, the director of the college’s computer science department. Before beginning the statistics workshop with Stone, Romero sketched out a career path that was deeply rooted in science and math.
“I learned what I wanted to be when I’m older,” Romero said. “I want to do technology in the Army. I like computers and I think they’re interesting to learn about … We made a web page, we took video of two students,” she said, adding that the site included an inspirational quote from Eleanor Roosevelt.
What’s more, Romero said the class included information about the concurrent enrollment programs for high school students through CCA. With a specific career already in mind, Romero said she was eager to follow up on taking college classes as a high school student in the Aurora Public Schools district.
In pursuing a career based in science and math, Romero won’t have to look far for a female role model. Her mother is an accountant, Romero explained, and she seems to have a genetic connection to numbers. Instead of discouraging her goals, the CCA professors were quick to make sure that early spark of enthusiasm could eventually turn in to a career.
Reach reporter Adam Goldstein at agoldstein@aurorasentinel.com or 720-449-9707
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