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XX to the nth power

The people who would suggest (like you, Mr. Harvard President) that women aren't genetically suited to solving math problems haven't met Sharleen Teal.

By JEFF KLINKENBERG
Published March 3, 2005

[Times photo: Cherie Diez]

Sharleen Teal, 18, center right, is one of four girls out of 31 students in the second-year AP calculus class at the Center for Advanced Technologies at Lakewood High School in St. Petersburg. “Even when I was in elementary school I had to fight with the boys about something I could or couldn’t do,” Sharleen says. “I was like, ‘Just watch me.’ ”

	Sharleen, taking calculus notes, says she wants to be a mechanical engineer.

ST. PETERSBURG - Here is the problem with high school boys. They like those Matrix movies. They love those Matrix movies with a passion. High school boys want to be Keanu Reeves or - what's his name in the movie? Neo. They want to fly through the air while knocking bullets out of the way like Neo.

Neo, a hero? How about Archimedes, who was born in 287 B.C. in Syracuse, on Sicily, when that Mediterranean island was this hopping, kick-you-in-the-butt Greek city-state? Archimedes is sometimes called the father of integral calculus. Archimedes rocks.

But let us return, for a moment, to Neo, to Keanu, to Matrix and hear what Sharleen Teal has to say on the matter. Sharleen says, "Matrix? I don't do Matrix. With the guys it's Matrix, Matrix, all the time Matrix. I've seen Matrix but I don't see what the excitement is about. Where is the greatness?"

Tough cookie, Sharleen. She is a math girl. In fact, she is among the top math students at Lakewood High School's Center for Advanced Technologies, or CAT, in St. Petersburg. She is 18 years old, tall and brunet, and poised to graduate with honors in the spring. She has already been offered scholarships to Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne and to QWGeorgia Tech. Hopefully, those college boys will be more serious. Perhaps they will be into Archimedes.

Not long ago, the president of Harvard was talking about women and science and math. Some ears thought they heard the president sounding like one of those doofus high school boys Sharleen often encounters. You know, one of those boys who tells her she can't do something because she is a girl.

If the college president - his name is Lawrence Summers - had said, "You know, more men then women tend to be attracted to the sciences and to math," he would have been on solid ground. Instead he suggested that men are attracted to science, and to math, because they are naturally better at it.

Of course, everybody knows that women and men are different. Maybe one day somebody will prove, beyond doubt, that male brains are better than female brains at math. But at this point there is no such proof. Perhaps one day we will find out that women are just as good as men in math when they are encouraged early on. Perhaps over the centuries females have been encouraged to apply their talents elsewhere and simply haven't caught up. The Harvard guy has since apologized for his impolitic remarks. But at least he stimulated a discussion that may yield something positive.

Sharleen Teal lives in Seminole with her parents and her older sister. When Sharleen's mother, Fran, read the story in the paper about the Harvard president, she bristled. In the interest of motivation, she cut out the article and placed it where Sharleen would be sure to read it.

"Even when I was in elementary school I had to fight with the boys about something I could or couldn't do," Sharleen says. "I was like, "Just watch me.' "

Sharleen wants to be a mechanical engineer. She wants to get her master's degree and, who knows, perhaps a doctorate. Teach? Well, maybe college. She could also build things, bridges perhaps, or tall buildings, or even machines that make the world a better place.

She will graduate from Lakewood's challenging CAT program in the top 5 percent of her class. At the moment, her grade point average is 4.59. An A grade in her advanced classes is worth 5 points instead of the more customary 4-point A in traditional classes. She winces remembering getting a B in a sophomore biology class and a C in a statistics class one unfortunate term. If only she had focused more. Then perhaps she would be closer to graduating with an almost unheard of 5.0 GPA. Classmates recently voted her "most likely to succeed."

Sharleen's parents knew both their daughters were special even when they were little. Her sister, Stephanie, who is now a freshman business management major at St. Petersburg College, had a talent for fun and connecting with people. "If you had put Stephanie in cardboard box by herself it would have sounded like there was a party going on," says her mom Fran. "If you put Shar in a box by herself she would have said, "This is a stupid waste of time. Get me out of here.' "

Tough cookie, the math girl.

"Even as a toddler, she was meticulous," says her dad Steve. "She could play in the dirt and not get dirty."

In first grade, Sharleen read so well she helped teach reading to other kids at her school. She taught herself to type. Math and science were her favorites. Her elementary school teacher, Cindy Webb, remembers an architecture project that was so good it was almost professional. "She knew exactly how that building was put together," Webb says. "I remember her once building the roof on a gingerbread house with M&Ms turned upside down. I swore they were real shingles."

Where did this ability come from? Her mother is a high school graduate who sells real estate. Her dad had two years of college and is a community relations specialist for the phone company.

At home, mom is the problem solver. "I hated high school, barely got through, but I have a logical mind," Fran says. She fixes the plumbing and does other repairs. She once replaced a radiator in a car and thinks she could do it again if she had time.

Fran and Steve stopped helping Sharleen with homework in middle school. They could no longer understand the math. However they have never stopped parenting.

"Lighten up," Steve tells her. "It's okay to smile once a day."

"Get some sleep," Fran tells her.

"I'm trying," Sharleen answers.

Hard being a math girl.

"I'm not a social outcast, and I like to have fun, but I'm a serious person overall," Sharleen says. "I don't seem to look at the world the way others do."

Her best friend is Whitney Johnson, a senior at Seminole High. The girls have known each other since middle school. Whitney is smart, too. Recently, they made a whirlwind tour of Florida college campuses. Whitney drove and opened the sun roof and turned the music up. They listened to '80s music, the B-52's and Blondie, on the way to the University of Central Florida and University of Florida. They went to a frat party at UF. Sharleen was unimpressed. These were not the kind of boys who drop Archimedes into their conversations.

Sharleen goes out with boys anyway. But she says, "Dating is distracting right now. I don't see the point of getting serious with someone and having to keep track of him while he keeps track of me. I prefer my independence."

Dating, among other things, interferes with sleeping. Recently she conked out while watching Desperate Housewives.

It was barely 9 p.m.

She wakes in the dark, dresses quickly, eats a little, jumps into her 13-year-old Buick with Happy Meal toys on the dash and drives to school 15 miles away. Classes begin at 7:30. She spends the first two hours helping teacher Louis Zulli get the school's network of computers ready. Sharleen is a computer person and is looking forward to buying her first personal laptop soon.

She works 20 hours every weekend babysitting. She pays for her own clothes and for her meals outside the home and for her car insurance. She is good at budgeting and planning. She has managed to save $2,000. She has her eye on a new Dell laptop. She wants one with 512 megabytes of RAM and a 60-gigabyte hard drive.

"She's as good as I have ever had," says Zulli, a teacher since 1977. "As far as she is concerned, there is no glass ceiling she has to crash through. She's absolutely fearless. She will take on any assignment."

Recently she volunteered to be managing editor of the Lakewood yearbook. She spends two hours after school every day cropping photos and writing text.

The early part of the day is spent on Advanced Placement Physics and Advanced Placement Statistics followed by her least favorite course, Advanced Placement Literature. "I don't know how I'm going to use it in my career," she says, poised to tackle Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, a novel about a complicated family in fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi.

Sharleen values clarity. She values straightforward sentences. In the future she will be sentenced to reading the following paragraph:

"When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's."

Archimedes, Archimedes. Can you come to the aid of a math girl in distress?

Last class of the day is Laura Lake's calculus course. Lake defines calculus as the "study of motion and change." Lake says, "A lot of students who have done well in math struggle with calculus. Calculus is not about memorization of formulas. It's about seeing the big picture. It helps if you can think outside the box."

Lake was a math girl, too. She remembers teachers who didn't understand her obsessions. Hanging in a classroom is a beanie with a propeller on top, sent by her brother who considers her a "math nerd." On her first date with the man she married, they discussed the "mean value theorem." Her husband, a retired computer consultant, owns a sailboat. When they are afloat on the bay, they listen to Frank Sinatra and talk about vector resolution: the force of the wind on the sail. Recently she read a book about quantum mechanics.

She is into Archimedes, often regarded as the greatest mathematician and scientist of antiquity. He was an expert on what, at first glance, reads almost like a Faulkner sentence but isn't: plane equilibriums, quadrature of the parabola, conoids and spheroids, floating bodies and the measurement of a circle. He was killed by invading Romans during the Second Punic War. According to one account, he was working on a math problem when a soldier ran him through. When her class reads about Archimedes, Lake plays a CD, Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat.

After calculus, after working on the yearbook, Sharleen Teal builds robots. She and 50 other Lakewood CAT students meet at the factory associated with Baxter Health Care in Largo and work on their latest machines. Baxter makes medical equipment at the factory; after hours it donates space and expertise to CAT students and their robots.

The CAT students design the robot and write the computer program that runs it. Workers at the factory machine the parts and offer advice.

The current robot, which weighs 120 pounds and stands about 5 feet high, will be used in state competition this spring. The robot is shaped somewhat like an animal, perhaps a llama, though it has a mouth that might remind a science-fiction buff of the monster in Alien. The greedy mouth telescopes down toward its target in a terrifying way. What the robot does - what it will be required to do at the upcoming robot competition in Orlando - is move across a floor at 16 feet per second, stop on a dime, and pick up 10-pound objects with that horrible beak of a mouth. Then it is supposed to stack the objects in neat piles.

Tom Bunbury, a senior boy who is not a geek even though he's a Matrix kind of guy - he wants to go to MIT or Georgia Tech - will use a radio-controlled joystick to move the robot backward and forward. Sharleen will use her own joystick to pick up objects and place them in the right spot. It's delicate work that requires a cool hand.

"I've never seen her get excited," says Lakewood's Paul Dickman, who advises the robotics students. "She is always cool."

Sharleen, however, is nervous for Sharleen.

"You usually don't see girls driving robots," she says. "I don't want to hear someone say, "Oh, she's a girl.' "

At the factory, Lakewood boys swarm over the robot as if it were an Xbox, another boy-toy machine, by the way, that Sharleen disdains. "I'm not into hunt-and-kill games," she says. She watches the boys work on the robot and then dives elbow-deep into its guts.

The wiring bothers her. The boys slapped wires into the robot willy-nilly. The wires snake through the robot's belly like the worst Faulkner sentence in the history of Faulkner. She reroutes the wires. They're straight now, logical.

"I like things correct and neat," she says. "If something breaks, and things do break, I want to be able to get in there quickly and not have to figure out where the wires go. I am proud of my wiring."

- Jeff Klinkenberg can be reached at 727 893-8727 and klink@sptimes.com

The Center for Advanced Technologies at Lakewood High School in St. Petersburg has 485 active students: 153 girls and 332 boys.

[Last modified March 2, 2005, 11:50:05]