MORGANTOWN — Half the students in Janalee Thorn’s computer science classes at University High School are female. If you think that’s a number worth computing on a national and international scale, you are correct.
UHS last week became the first-ever school in West Virginia to receive the Advanced Placement Computer Science Female Diversity Award for its advancements in that arena.
And the school is also just one of 685 institutions in the world to be recognized. Yes, the world.
The reason for that relatively low number just might owe itself to social barriers.
That is, the fact of societal life that people who “do” computers and computer science are regarded in a different way, the teacher said.
The above may even go back to the ingrained elementary school stereotype which decrees that boys are “good” at math — while girls aren’t.
Those were the conclusions of research published last year in the academic journal, Frontiers in Psychology.
Less than 20 percent of all four-year degrees in computer science and engineering are earned by females, so the numbers match the thought.
Thorn, meanwhile, gleefully hits the delete key on all the above in her classes with their gender mix.
The teacher also converts students who try to shut down after saying they can’t “do” math.
“Anyone is capable of math,” she said. “Anyone is capable of computer programming.”
Translation: Don’t let yourself be intimidated.
Thorn was never intimated by the idea of teaching.
She knew she wanted to be in front of a classroom since she was a little girl.
“And I was lucky,” she said. “I had a lot of great teachers when I was growing up.”
Math teachers, especially.
Conceptual math in college kicked down the door for good.
That’s the extra-column discipline where one learns that numbers, and numerical orders, are the essence of, well … everything.
Thorn gets to multiply the joy of that discovery every time the bell rings for her classes at UHS.
“I like it when I see students mastering something they never thought they could,” the teacher said.
“There’s nothing like it when the light bulb goes on.”
JBissett@DominionPost.com
Twitter @DominionPostWV
