Over the years, I've told colleagues and friends about things I have seen or experienced. Many times, people have said that I should write them down so that they won't be lost and forgotten, since some of them might be useful parts of our history. I've been writing them down, without being sure what I would do with them. I decided to gradually post them on this website, and see what reactions I get. I suggest reading from the bottom up (starting with the August 2017 post "The Meritocracy"). Thoughtful and kind feedback would be useful for me, and would help me to revise the exposition to make it as useful as possible. I hope that while you read my stories you will ask yourself "What can I learn from this?" I'm particularly interested in knowing what you see as the point of the story, or what you take away from it. Please send feedback to asilverb@gmail.com. Thanks for taking the time to read and hopefully reflect on them!

I often run the stories past the people I mention, even when they are anonymized, to get their feedback and give them a chance to correct the record or ask for changes. When they tell me they're happy to be named, I sometimes do so. When I give letters as pseudonyms, there is no correlation between those letters and the names of the real people.

Wednesday, January 5, 2022

Silver for Silverberg

On one of the first days of sixth grade, Mrs. Toder, my math teacher, insisted that we laboriously show our work when we cancelled fractions. She wanted us to completely factor the numerator and denominator and draw a line through a common factor in both, in a long series of equalities, rather than doing it all at once.

We had been cancelling fractions without showing our work since fifth grade. I was incensed. We weren't children anymore; we were old enough to be allowed to cancel fractions!

Having been one of the best math students in fifth grade, I felt that I had the responsibility to speak up on behalf of my classmates, and regain our God-given right to cancel fractions. I ignored what was happening around me, as I planned the rousing speech I would give that would earn us back our rights.

Each student shared a desk with one classmate. Girls were paired with girls, and boys with boys, except that the number of girls and the number of boys were each odd, so Robert Goldberg and I shared a desk. I wasn't a popular kid, and I was afraid the girls would tease me for having to share a desk with a boy.

I raised my hand, and when Mrs. Toder called on me, I stood and delivered my speech. She moved away from the blackboard to reveal a math problem she had been writing there while I had been ignoring what was going on. "Solve this," she said.

Stunned, I froze. I wasn't prepared for this. Hands shot up around me, so I gave up, in shame. Worse, after Mrs. Toder called on Robert Goldberg and he gave the correct answer, she turned to me and, in front of the whole class, said, "if you were as smart as Robert Goldberg, I'd let you cancel fractions without showing your work."

Humiliated, I resolved that someday I would prove that I was as smart as Robert Goldberg!

Bob and I both did well in math that year. And the class eventually earned our right to cancel fractions. Mrs. Toder and I soon warmed to each other, and she ended up being my favorite teacher.

Postscript:

Two years later, at our junior high school graduation, some girls in my class came to me very upset because I had only gotten the Silver Medal in math. The Gold Medal went to Robert Goldberg. These classmates felt that I did (a little) better than Bob in math class, and they thought this was a clear case of sexism.

At that time, and for a long time afterwards, I was completely oblivious to the sexism around me (which probably made life easier for me for a while). And I didn't mind that Bob got the Gold Medal, since I knew we were both good at math and either of us could have gotten the Gold. I replied, "I don't think it's sexism. They probably felt, at least subconsciously, that they couldn't give the Gold Medal to Silverberg and the Silver Medal to Goldberg. That just doesn't sound right!"