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The Current Transcript for October 4, 2016

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

JUSTIN TRUDEAU: The government proposes that the price on carbon pollution should start at a minimum of $10 per tonne in 2018 rising to $50 in 2022.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: He may have just lost his sunny ways under a cloud of emissions surprises. That unexpected announcement from the prime minister has Saskatchewan's premier spitting, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia walking and Alberta angling for a deal, even as environmentalists consider it a paltry effort at addressing climate change. We will hear from the critics and from the minister on this portfolio—Catherine McKenna in just a moment. Also today, a classroom full of smartphones.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Cell phone beeping]

Ahh, the cell phone menace has returned to our crucible of learning. Sharpay and Ryan, cell phones. And I will see you in detention.

AMT: Some teachers want to ban them. Others want to use them. Is the smartphone a distraction or a device to help you learn? We've got the teachers and the debate in half an hour. And then, the hidden story of how a group of African-American women, all of them wizards at mathematics, advanced the space race and civil rights.

SOUNDCLIP

When we think about the first black Americans in the space program, we're talking about women.

AMT: Segregated, underestimated and invaluable, a group of women known as computers pushed for their rights and made a lasting mark on the US space program. Hear their stories in an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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'Time to put a price on pollution': Environment minister defends carbon pricing ultimatum

Guests: Elizabeth May, Kenneth Green, Catherine McKenna

SOUNDCLIP

We see that neither the New Democrats nor the Conservatives understand that you need to build a strong economy and protect the environment at the same time. For the New Democrats, we’re not doing enough to protect the environment. For the Conservatives, we're not doing enough to build a strong economy. Well, the fact is Canadians know that we are doing both of them simultaneously.

AMT: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau faced angry critics on both sides yesterday, insisting his plan to put a price on carbon pollution is a good thing. But you wouldn't know it at the meeting of environment ministers. Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador walked out of climate talks after the announcement with one dubbing the plan “National Energy Program 2.0.” Several provinces do have carbon pricing, but the Liberals say Ottawa will impose a carbon price on any jurisdiction that doesn't have its own in motion by 2018. In a few minutes we'll hear from the Minister of the Environment and Climate Change Catherine McKenna. But first I'm joined by Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party. The Green Party and Ms. May have been calling for a national carbon tax for years. Elizabeth May is in Montreal. Joining us from Calgary is Kenneth Green. He is the senior director of natural resource studies at the Fraser Institute. He's not a fan. Hello to you both.

KENNETH GREEN: Good morning.

ELIZABETH MAY: Hello.

AMT: Elizabeth May, is this the proposal you've been waiting for?

ELIZABETH MAY: Well, certainly we've been waiting to see carbon pricing across Canada and this is very clear that the Liberal platform—it did not have a lot of details on climate action—but clearly this was up front in the front window of the Liberal platform is we will bring in carbon pricing nationally and we will get rid of fossil fuel subsidies. We still have to see the fossil fuel subsidies removed but this is indeed a well-designed project and certainly the architecture of it is good. I think they're starting way too low—a $10 a tonne carbon price is far below what numbers of provinces are already. You know British Columbia's carbon tax needs to be increased. It's stalled $30 a tonne. And the premier's blue ribbon panel rep recommended that she start increasing it, ramping up to $360 a tonne by 2050. But certainly at $30 a tonne in BC, everybody's used to it. And we have to remember that these are not tax grabs, they are revenue neutral. So in British Columbia, every penny taken in from pollution is a tax deduction to the average British Columbian, which you know it's only 6.6 cents a litre right now in BC. It's very well accepted.

AMT: Okay. Elizabeth May, let’s get Kenneth Green in here. That's your initial reaction. Kenneth Green, what do you think?

KENNETH GREEN: Well, so I'm sorry to disagree with Ms. May but in fact in the beginning—

AMT: Oh, where’d he go?

ELIZABETH MAY: I don’t know.

AMT: Okay. Kenneth Green, we’re going to get you back. While we wait to get Kenneth Green back, Elizabeth May, what is a tonne of carbon?

ELIZABETH MAY: What is a tonne of carbon? Well, the release of greenhouse gases is measured in tonnes and globally in megatonnes. So Canada is currently—we currently need to reduce substantially in order to reach—this is a more substantial point that I need to make—is that carbon pricing by itself won't achieve the targets that we have as a country. And the targets we currently have as a country particularly since—this has been a very disappointing development that the Liberals have decided to keep the target that Stephen Harper announced about six months before we went into an election. So the carbon target of the Harper administration is now the carbon target of the Trudeau administration. But you can't even get to that with carbon pricing alone.

AMT: Okay.

ELIZABETH MAY: You need aggressive actions that create jobs, investments in infrastructure, much more work in energy efficiency.

AMT: Okay. Let’s bring Kenneth Green. Elizabeth, we're going to have to let Kenneth Green in here. Hold on. Kenneth Green, what do you think? You got cut off too soon here.

KENNETH GREEN: What I was going to point out is that in fact, across Canada, the vast majority of jurisdictions implementing carbon taxes are not even pretending to have the revenue neutral. Here in Alberta, it’ll be spent on pet government projects. The same is true in Ontario. Even in British Columbia they're now rebating additional revenues not to people in their income taxes or corporate taxes but they're giving them to favoured constituency in the environmental sector and the agricultural sector. These taxes are not textbook carbon taxes that are offset by other tax cuts to distortionary taxes and that replace regulations. These are just a new energy tax that governments can use to spend on their favoured projects rather than you having the money to spend on your favorite project.

AMT: Do you think they will work, Kenneth Green, in terms of emissions reductions?

KENNETH GREEN: Around the edges they will. People's demand for energy is really very, very, very tight. And so it is hard to get people to shift away from using large amounts of energy because they have fixed sources that have to be heated, their houses, their cars have to be fueled. They have a distance to their work, many things that are not easily changed. But around the edges, yes. You will reduce carbon emissions a little bit, certainly not enough to actually affect climate. Even all of Canada wouldn't do that.

AMT: Elizabeth May, you have said that the price is too low. How high does it have to go?

ELIZABETH MAY: Well, it's not a question of how high it has to go, it's a question of where you start. And the important thing is that you do start. So let's just be clear that nothing the prime minister did yesterday should have surprised provinces. He told them back in March in the Vancouver meeting that any provinces that didn't come into an agreement that the federal government was prepared to go it alone. And again, what they have said they will do is if they do end up imposing a carbon tax, a carbon price on a province, that any revenue received from that will be returned to that very province. So again, it's not appropriate to call this in any way a federal tax grab. What the prime minister is doing, which is essential, is creating a national price that’s uniform because business needs certainty. You can't have British Columbia have a $30 tonne carbon tax and say you know in Alberta—you know $30 a tonne is low in the world. We need to ramp up. I mean just to give you some frame of reference, right now the carbon tax in Sweden—but they started in the early 1990s—their carbon tax is now $219 a tonne. Their economy has done better while they had the carbon tax in place. The same is true for Denmark and Norway. They imposed a price on carbon basically to fix—and this is something the Fraser Institute should understand—to fix a market failure. If you don't count dumping pollution into the atmosphere and having a cost, then you're sending a false signal to your famous market that's going to figure everything out. You have to internalize that externality. By putting a price on carbon, you're just leveling out the playing field a bit. On top of that, you need to do much, much more.

AMT: Kenneth Green, how do you respond to that economic argument?

KENNETH GREEN: Sure. Well, first of all, we won't have uniform carbon pricing across the provinces because this is a minimum price, not a maximum price and provinces are encouraged to do more. So we're not likely to have a uniform or a level playing field. But the other point is that again, these are distortionary taxes that will weaken the economy at a time when we need a little additional extra weakening in the Canadian economy. The end [inaudible] a vastly higher carbon price, which will [inaudible] radical changes in the way people live and I don't believe the changes are going to be anywhere equal to the benefits of the tax. We certainly need it. Fraser Institute certainly understands the externalities in pricing. But the point is this is not real pricing because governments are setting the value of carbon permits and value of, therefore the value of the environment arbitrarily. Markets price things because—markets work because they use voluntary exchange between people to figure out the value of things and this is nothing like that. This is the government coming in and saying we're going to cap emissions at this level because of the Paris agreement. And we're going to put a price on carbon emissions at this height. It's the institution of carbon rationing. There's no market here. There's basically carbon rationing. If there's a market, it's like the market in cigarettes in a prison. People are going to be trading their ration stamps in order to continue operating their houses, their businesses, their schools, their churches, their mini malls, and all the other things that we power with fossil fuel energy every day. So you know the environmentalists are happy. They say this is a good thing, it's the camel's nose under the tent and pretty soon we will feed the camel in and others like Ms. May want to have the camel walk right through the front door and start the tax perhaps of $100, $200, $300 hours per tonne. But it's really just the tax that's going to fund the infrastructure dreams of provincial governments and it's not going to be the textbook benign carbon tax that is rebated to you and your nice carbon refund cheque every month. It's not going to be—it's not shaping up to be that and it's not being discussed as a future possibility in most of the provinces now developing carbon pricing.

AMT: So Kenneth Green, this is clearly polarizing. What will this do to politics in the country?

KENNETH GREEN: Well, it can help to make this a left-right issue any more than it could help to make the Keystone pipeline issue a left-right issue in the United States. Once this gets polarized with Conservatives versus Liberals, it really undermines the whole stability of the concept because the next form of government that comes in can undo what the previous government has done. We've seen this in Australia. We've seen this in other European jurisdictions where governments come in and they unravel what the previous government did, which then tries to get back in again to put it back in place and you go bouncing back and forth between unstable policy, all of which sends your real investor markets into a tizzy of uncertainty because they need some sort of certainty and yet you go election to election and the people who have the authority to change the scheme are the ones who get elected.

AMT: Okay. Elizabeth May, we have very little time. Very briefly, do you see this as polarizing or is this just bluster from the provinces right now?

ELIZABETH MAY: Let's be clear that this is not a radical proposal. Carbon pricing has been advocated now by—for years—by the International Monetary Fund, by the World Bank, by the International Energy Agency. This is basic stuff. It should not be seen as polarizing an election, was conducted in which this was in a platform, it certainly was also in the platforms of the Greens and the NDP to take serious carbon action. We are facing a climate emergency. And one looks at the risks of the—and even just the monetary risks—of extreme weather events of allowing climate change to gallop ahead and us missing our Paris agreement targets. The consequences are nothing less than a threat to human civilization itself.

AMT: We have to leave it there. We have to leave it there. Elizabeth May, we have to leave it there. Thank you. Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party. She's in Montreal. Kenneth Green, senior director of natural resource studies at the Fraser Institute. He's in Calgary. Catherine McKenna is the federal minister of the environment and climate change. She has been listening in. She joins us from Ottawa. Hello.

CATHERINE MCKENNA: Hi Anna Maria.

AMT: Now you all seem to be getting along so well. why did you spring this on the environment ministers yesterday?

CATHERINE MCKENNA: You know we had a really good conversation about a whole range of issues where we agree. There's actually broad agreement on how we need to reduce emissions from houses, from vehicles, how we deal with extreme weather from climate change that we're seeing across the country, how we make investments in jobs and innovation. And look, politics is always going to be politics, but we're really focused on solutions. And you know most of the provinces stayed in the room. And what we're proposing is really not—it shouldn’t been surprising for anyone. There's been working groups that have been working the past months, including on carbon pricing. I've had bilateral meetings with all of my colleagues a number of times. We have technical people that have gone out to all the provinces and territories and right now, over 80 per cent of Canadians live in a province where there's a price on pollution. And so basically all we're saying is it's time to pick a lane, figure out what makes sense for your province and you decide what you do with the revenues. So provinces can decide, like BC, that they're going to do a tax cut, give money back to consumers and small businesses. But everyone knows that it's time to put a price on what we don't want: price inclusions. And we saw a poll yesterday where the majority of Canadians have said it's time to put a price on pollution.

AMT: Okay. So how do you react to the fact that Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia walked out?

CATHERINE MCKENNA: As I said, you know politics is going to be politics. They were there for the bulk of the meeting where as I said we discussed a whole range of other issues. And we're going to continue discussing with them. I was in Saskatchewan. I went to see carbon capture and storage. I met with the agriculture industry. It was great to see what they're doing on zero-till agriculture, climate resilient crops. I think there’s huge opportunity to tell the story internationally about what Saskatchewan is doing on climate change and I plan to do this at COP 22. So we're just going to keep on keeping on. We need solutions and Canadians expect leadership on this issue and that's what we're going to continue to do.

AMT: You know the premier of Saskatchewan Mr. Wall issued a statement yesterday saying the plan would “siphon over $2.5 billion from Saskatchewan's economy when fully implemented.” How do you respond to that?

CATHERINE MCKENNA: Well, that's just not true. He knows the revenue—we've made it extremely clear that the revenues go back to the province. We have business saying please put a price on carbon. Send the signal to the market that you're serious. This is the cheapest way for us to reduce emissions. It will force us or it will encourage us to innovate and create good jobs. And so we saw yesterday Shell and Suncor come out in support of carbon pricing and we're seeing it across the country. So it's really up to Saskatchewan and the other provinces to decide what system works for them. They can look at the model of Alberta and BC in the West, which Manitoba I think is studying that system. Or they can look at the cap and trade that Ontario and Quebec have. And we're going to continue working. I'm going to continue working on this file. My officials have been working extraordinarily hard with officials from provinces and territories across the country. We're going to keep on doing this. There's going to be maybe a lot of noise. This is a hard issue. But I think we're just going to keep on moving forward because Canadians expect us to take action.

AMT: Alberta says it likes the idea in principle but wants a pipeline before it agrees to this. Will they get the pipeline?

CATHERINE MCKENNA: Well, that's a regulatory process. For any major project, it's got to go through an environmental assessment. I mean the good thing with Alberta—and I really have to give credit to the leadership of Alberta—they put a price on carbon. They are phasing out coal. They put a hard cap on the oil sands and they clearly understand what we're saying, is that if you want to get your natural resources to market in the 21st century, you have to be able to show that you can do it in a sustainable way. Part of that is taking action on climate change.

AMT: The economist, Mark Jaccard, of Simon Fraser University has said the price would have to be higher—$200 a tonne—for Canada to meet the Paris agreement targets for 2030. That is seven times higher than the price set by even the most ambitious provinces. Why did you pick the numbers you did?

CATHERINE MCKENNA: Well, so I've read his report. We picked the numbers because we understand that we need to get going on carbon pricing but that's not the only measure. So you know some economists take a very hard line on you should only put a price on emissions. We know that we can do a lot better. We can have much more energy efficient buildings, energy efficient vehicles. We're making investments in public transit. We're making investments in innovation. It's going to be innovation that's going to be part of the solution. So we're not just going to do this on carbon pricing alone. We're going to take other measures. And I think that's a sensible way. Canadians expect us to be practical, to be thoughtful and to build on what is already out there. And there's a lot of leadership that was shown in the past decade when the federal government wasn't there, by BC, by Alberta, by Ontario, by Quebec Even Nova Scotia who unfortunately left yesterday, they've done a really good job in reducing emissions. It's just now putting a market price, having the market engaged on this, pricing what you don't want is just a sensible way to go for it and that's why businesses are supporting them.

AMT: Do you think this will lead people—individuals and corporations—to change their behaviour?

CATHERINE MCKENNA: Yes because when people realize that you're going to save money if you pollute less, yes, that's the whole point of this. But as I say, there's going to be other measures. We know we need to make additional investments. We know that we can have more energy efficient buildings. We know that we can do better in the transport sector when you look at where we need to reduce emissions. So this is a transition and we're positioning ourselves well because the solutions we find in Canada, the opportunities we find here, the innovations, we can then export them. I did a panel with the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, and he talked about the $30 trillion opportunity that is China. And so we really want to be taking advantage of our opportunity. I'm going to be going to China later this year. I'm going to be bringing companies that have solutions, whether it's you know how to develop natural resources in a cleaner way or clean tax or renewables. This is really about how do we position in Canada for you know the next 50 years? And Canadians expect us. I've heard from Canadians across the country. We had a working group process where company, individuals, Indigenous leaders, municipalities, everyone weighed in. And they're now expecting leadership and it's time to deliver.

AMT: And I want to ask about the timing. Did you feel pressure to move on this now with the backlash last week from environmental groups for your LNG approval in BC?

CATHERINE MCKENNA: No. You know what, you need to make decisions you know on the merits. I had to make a decision. There was a timeline on that project. This was as a result of working groups. So there were four working groups that played in. One was a working group that looked at putting a price on carbon pollution and we felt we should make it clear what the position was with the government, provide more clarity. I had already been clear, as was the prime minister, that there are two systems. There are two systems. There are two systems that exist in this country. So this is part of it. You know I think it was unfortunate that three governments decided to leave. I think I believe in talking. I think that's a better way to move forward. I think Canadians expect that. This is not a polarized debate. Yesterday, as I say, there was a poll out where the majority of Canadians want to put a price on pollution. They want sensible measures. They want to see concrete action. They want to understand how they can be part of the solution. How can they reduce emissions from their houses and save money? You know what are the options for public transit, for electric vehicles? And so we're going to move forward and it's going to position Canada well. It's going to create good jobs. It's going to help us innovate.

AMT: Okay. Well, Catherine McKenna, thank you for your time.

CATHERINE MCKENNA: Great. Thank you.

AMT: Catherine McKenna, federal minister of environment and climate change. She joined us from Ottawa. She says it's not a polarized debate. Well, we'll see how it goes today in the House of Commons as well. Stay with us. The news is next. Then they are either the best or the worst thing to happen to the classroom since the blackboard and chalk. We’ll hear from a panel of teachers about how to deal with smartphones at school. If you're joining us partway through, remember you can listen to us online www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. Download the podcast. Tweet us. We are @thecurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Write to us from our site. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM and online on www.cbc.ca/thecurrent.

[Music: Sting]

Back To Top »

Teachers debate the merits of smartphones in classrooms

Guests: Michele Muzzi, Paddy McCallum, Brayden Plummer

AMT: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, an untold story of the space age and the civil rights era. They were the hidden figures, a group of African-American women whose job at NASA was to do the math. At stake was nothing less than the safe return of astronauts from space. We will hear their story in half an hour. But first, making wise use of smartphones at school.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: At previous schools, I've had teachers take cell phones like before class. I don't think that they should be banned. I think that it should be the responsibility of the student to use them productively.

VOICE 2: I don't think they should be banned either because it's helpful to look up definitions and stuff during the class.

VOICE 3: No, I don't think they should be banned because I use instead of my computer when I forget to bring it.

[Sound: Camera shutter]

VOICE 2: Sometimes cell phones can be really annoying like if people are—like your friends and stuff are taking Snapchats of you when you're trying to learn in class.

VOICE 3: It's annoying when they don't have it on silent so you have to hear their clicking and tapping and everything.

[Sound: Phone ringing]

VOICE 1: Just having like the ringer on or if somebody is playing music in class, that's pretty annoying as well.

VOICE 4: I haven’t been called out on it yet but I keep it out on my desk. I do look at notes but I am also on Snapchat. Snapchat people in the class.

VOICE 5: Usually just playing games on my phone. Like these baseball type games that I have. I could easily get more done if I don’t pull out my phone. It’ll help out the students a lot more if there is no cell phones allowed but I don't know how people would react to that.

AMT: Well, there you go, some students in Winnipeg voicing their thoughts on one of the most contentious conundrums in the classroom today: what to do about the ubiquitous and useful but massively distracting smartphone. Most Canadian school boards allow phones in high school classrooms albeit with some restrictions that are usually left up to the teacher to decide and police. In fact, some boards such as the Toronto District School Board—which had banned phones—have reversed their policies. And now one Toronto teacher is taking a new approach. This is Shahnaz Khan, an English teacher at Northern Secondary School speaking with CBC Radio Toronto's Metro Morning.

SOUNDCLIP

In my classroom, what I'm trying to do this year—it's a bit of a pilot project—is I'm trying to create an option within the existing policy at the school for parents to sign on to let me confiscate a cell phone if I should need to do so from a student. So that if I need to swoop in and take the cell phone, I already know that I'm backed by a parent to do that.

AMT: Shahnaz Khan does not just keep the phone until the end of class. Parents have to pick up the phones from the vice principal's office 24 hours later. No matter how they choose to handle phones in their classrooms, all high school educators today have to grapple with the issues. And I'm joined by three of them now to share their thoughts and experiences. Michele Muzzi is an English and drama teacher at Sir Wilfrid Laurier Collegiate Institute in Toronto. Paddy McCallum is a media and literature teacher at Chatelech Community Secondary School in Sechelt, BC and Brayden Plummer is the headmaster at Pretty River Academy, a private school in Collingwood, Ontario. Hello everyone.

MICHELE MUZZI: Good morning.

PADDY MCCALLUM: Hello.

BRAYDEN PLUMMER: Hello.

AMT: Michele Muzzi, let's start with you. How do you feel about smartphones in the classroom?

MICHELE MUZZI: They upset me. I really am of the mind that they need to be put away in backpacks, not in pockets, not on desk. And I try to police that as best I can, both in my English classroom where there are desks and in my drama classroom where there are no desks.

AMT: And what's your experience? Do you find kids in the middle of like a drama presentation or something getting distracted by phones if they are there?

MICHELE MUZZI: Sometimes they'll try to shoot what is happening on the stage or in the studio. And I always try to stop that and ask them to delete it. Definitely they will have them out sometimes when we're doing drum exercises walking through the classroom. And if that's the case, I send them to the office and if they don't want to take them down, I have a hall monitor come to the classroom and they escort the student to the office where the phone is to stay until four o'clock. So there are some consequences for having your phone out in the classroom.

AMT: What's the school policy, Michele?

MICHELE MUZZI: That's the school policy that they need to—if the teacher deems it necessary to send a cell phone to the office, then the students can take the cell phone down themselves or the hall monitor will come and escort the student down where they will surrender their phone to the office until four o’clock.

AMT: Paddy McCallum, how do you feel about smartphones in your classroom?

PADDY MCCALLUM: Well, I have a bunch of different classrooms so I have a bunch of different approaches. I guess a bunch of different feelings. I have a literature 12 classroom which is run very much on a kind of seminar lit circle basis where we're just working with the literary text. It’s called Literature 12. So it’s usually grades 11 and 12 who are a little bit more mature and we set rules at the beginning of the class, at the beginning of the semester as to how the class, the phones and technology will be used and whether or not we even have any use for it. But I also teach media-rich courses like photography and video where the kids do use their phones to film, edit, send, upload to our website and actually do a lot of creative work with the phones. In fact, some photography teachers I know here in BC are not even providing phones for students anymore. It’s all “bring your own device.” But speaking about an acting classroom, it's interesting to hear another drama teacher talk about it because yes, those issues do come up and I understand those issues completely. The whole distraction issue, the whole filming of other kids issue. But again, we set rules at the beginning and you know just yesterday, in fact when The Current called me yesterday, I was in my acting class. Thirty 10s, 11s and 12s were in the theatre. Some kids were working on running lines, some kids were working on blocking scenes. But two kids who were doing the costumes and makeup were using their cell phones to check—because it’s the Halloween play— you know what they could do for werewolf faces and whatnot, while up in the sound and lighting booth, two boys were putting together playlists on their phone to run all our music and sound effects in sequence through the play. So there was utility for the phones in the room for those who needed them and for what we needed them for. And there was still other teaching and learning going on that did not require technology.

AMT: And can I clarify: did you take a call from The Current in the middle of that class?

PADDY MCCALLUM: [laughs] That was very unusual, I must say. The kids were mostly interested in my ringtone.

AMT: So that means yes. It rang in the class.

PADDY MCCALLUM: Pardon me?

AMT: So it did ring in the class.

PADDY MCCALLUM: It did ring in the class, yeah.

AMT: Okay. Well, let's—we’ll go back to that. [laughs] Brayden Plummer, what's the policy at your school?

BRAYDEN PLUMMER: Our school—I think it was two years ago now—we banned cell phones from the classroom unless it had a direct educational impact in the class. So in our classes, there's a little basket. Kids come in, they put phones in the basket unless they're using it directly for the lesson.

AMT: And how is that working?

BRAYDEN PLUMMER: It's been working pretty well. There's obviously always new kids that come in that are not familiar with the policy that we have to educate and reinforce the habit. It's always a little rockier in September after the kids come back for the summer. But in general it's been quite positive and we get a lot more impact out of our lessons when kids aren't being distracted.

AMT: And so how much energy do you spend policing students in their phone use, Michele?

MICHELE MUZZI: This year, I’m spending a great deal of energy especially in my drama class. I just find, as Brayden says, if you start at the beginning of the year and are really very strict with the policy, then they listen and they begin to accept it. If you try to instill a policy in the middle of the year, in the middle of the semester, they're not so amenable to that. So I've been sending phones to the office and attempting—every day I say, “Please put your phones away.” At the beginning of classes it’s the first thing I say, both in my English class and in my drama class. And sometimes it works and sometimes I have to ask more than once, I have to send it to the office and it's very frustrating. I find it very frustrating because they are extremely distracted by them.

AMT: What about what Brayden—not Brayden—Paddy McCallum is saying about using it in drama classes specific for specific purposes?

MICHELE MUZZI: I don't find that works for me. I've had students try writing their scripts on their phones and then I find that they really get sucked into their phones and it seems almost like it's not a script anymore. It's like they are reading something that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with something that could eventually become a performance. So I don't find it necessarily very useful. Definitely for sound though, definitely in the booth, it works very well. And I absolutely understand that you can use cell phones for research, that you can use cell phones to look up definitions of words. I have the students in my IB English classes look up words all the time on their cell phones. But when it is allowed, when it is actually part of the curriculum that they are able to use their cell phones in my classroom. But otherwise, Snapchat or Instagram or taking pictures of me or of their fellow classmates, that is absolutely forbidden in my classroom.

AMT: How do they react when you then order them to bring it to the office if it comes to that?

MICHELE MUZZI: Depends on the child. Depends on the teenager. Some of them refuse and will wait it out until the hall monitor comes. Some of them will definitely take it down. And then the next day, there is no cell phone that is revealed from that particular person. So the consequences do actually work if I stay strict with the actual policy.

AMT: How do parents react?

MICHELE MUZZI: I haven't had any negative experiences with parents unless they're phoning their child in the classroom, which happens sometimes. And there have been moments when I've answered the phone and said, “Please don’t call your child at this time. We are in the middle of a lesson.” And then that parent may become quite embarrassed and apologize. And yet that is the kind of thing that happens nowadays in the classroom. Parents will call their child. I just think that they have the ability to communicate with their child at their fingertips, as do the children to communicate with their friends, to communicate with their parents, their siblings. And this is just part of the society now. And there's nothing that we can really do to stop it except ask them to turn off their phones which many people are not necessarily willing to do. And because they have this ability at their fingertips, people don't necessarily think about time, they don't necessarily think, “Oh, it's 9:30. My child is in the classroom and therefore I should perhaps not phone her.”

AMT: Paddy McCallum, do you find that? Do you find parents calling students? Do you find them busy with Snapchat when they should be paying attention?

PADDY MCCALLUM: Well, of course. I mean I think there are a couple of dimensions to this. I mean and obviously as Michele points out, it's really down to individual teachers and their professional autonomy in the classroom as to how they want to handle this. But you know one issue is the, this sort of new connection to family and community that the phones represent for the kids and that's been emerging very strongly over the last five to six years. And there's some research emerging about that that suggests that the children are—particularly a lot of kids, we deal with in the public system who may be coming from homes where there's a lot of dysfunction, a lot of disruption—feel a need to stay connected or even almost see the phone as where their family is located in a sense. That's where they connect and meet and plan. So I don't get a lot of parents calling up, like phoning during the day, but I know they do text their kids. And I know it has come up for a lot of teachers around our province that simply taking the phone away or denying the child access to the phone has caused a pretty strong reaction from parents, perhaps even a stronger reaction in some cases from parents, so there is this new expectation that the child is available to the parents and the parents to the child on an almost 24/7 basis.

AMT: And so you talk about if there's dysfunction at home, but that allows the parent to allow the dysfunction to follow the kid right like every minute of the day too, right?

PADDY MCCALLUM: Well, I think it's more about the child and what may be some belonging issues, some need for support. I'm not talking so much about the parents because I don't know them but I do know the children in front of me and you know some of them have a need to stay connected. But then again, that's just one piece of it. The texting back and forth in the classroom can be very annoying. I mean I think what's bothering teachers right now—particularly secondary teachers—is that there are classes, curricula, even moments in every class when you want to do some direct teaching or you want to have some focused discussion. And the phones can be a terrible distraction. So one of the things that has been emerging from the workshops we've been doing around the province on this is that you know setting the rules in the class norms at the beginning of the year, so that you have something to refer to and involving the kids in setting those norms. So that the kids tell you what they expect. Some of them are bothered by this and they want some structure and rules. So we work out like for example, some teachers are having a bit of phone time in the middle of the class, you know five or 10 minutes of phone time. So now you can take out your phone, you can do some texting. Now put them away, let's move on. So that they know in the hour or the hour and 15 minutes of the class that they're going to have some time to do that. And those kinds of new approaches seem to be working for some teachers.

AMT: Well, let's bring Brayden Plummer into this a little more though. Brayden, your school is one of the only ones to implement a ban and stick to it. Why do you think it's working at Pretty River?

BRAYDEN PLUMMER: It’s working because we're consistently enforcing it. One of the things we believe quite strongly in is keeping kids present in that educational moment. You know cell phones, laptops, all those things are wonderful gateways to a huge body of knowledge .However, it's a distraction. You can start researching something and then get distracted and fall down that rabbit hole. By limiting how technology is used in the classroom, it keeps kids present in a discussion where they're learning from each other and fostering that bond. I've always found it really interesting when you're out in public and you see teenagers standing in a group and they're all texting, no one's talking. So we believe in conversation. We believe in discussion and that’s where you get great learning opportunities out those things and that dialogue with the teacher becomes very enriching.

AMT: I don't think we should just point to students who do that. I think you can find all age groups stuck on their smartphones, huh?

BRAYDEN PLUMMER: I was at a dinner the other night with my wife and I looked over and there was another couple that were sitting there and they just didn't talk the entire time. They were just on their phones. I found it staggering.

AMT: Now, Pretty River’s a small private school. You've got like what, 40 high school-aged students there?

BRAYDEN PLUMMER: Yeah, we have 40 out of 103 in the whole school, and about 40 in high school, yes.

AMT: What can larger schools learn from your experience?

BRAYDEN PLUMMBER: It's just about being consistent and maintaining those expectations. Technology is a huge, huge influence on children's lives no matter where they're from. But there's a life outside of that. There's a life being present with the people that are right beside you. And I think that's something that is becoming lost. That’s something we like to foster at our school.

AMT: I want to talk about the impact smartphones may have on learning. Richard Murphy is an assistant economics professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He studied test results for 16 year olds in Great Britain. Their schools implemented cell phone bans in the classroom. This is what he found.

SOUNDCLIP

On average, student performance increased by seven per cent of the standard deviation, which may sound okay, but it's equivalent to extending the school week by one hour or extending the whole academic year by one week. All the gains were driven by students who previously were doing poorly in exams. Anyone in the top half didn’t experience any gains from [unintelligible]. It was only students in the bottom half of the distribution.

AMT: Okay. Gains were driven by students who were previously doing poorly when they got rid of the smartphone. Brayden Plummer, do you think that cell phones were hurting your students’ education?

BRAYDEN PLUMMER: We haven't noticed any significant statistics when it came to the changing of marks. What we've noticed is an uptake in engagement level of students in the classes. You know like the previous people on the panel have said, we do use cell phones in class. We have a media class for their use. Sometimes for international students they’re using them for translation. But it's not a distraction. It's not there to entertain the kids. They're there to learn. That's the purpose of them being in the classroom.

AMT: Okay. And Richard Murphy, that professor there stressed his study measured unstructured smartphone use. It didn't address schools that were trying to integrate cell phones into the curriculum. Paddy McCallum, how difficult is it to change the smartphone from being a distraction to being a learning tool?

PADDY MCCALLUM: Well, when we do the workshop, you know we start off with a continuum in the room where people line up in a line and on one side, one end of the line is do you see the smartphone as a toy? And at the other end of the line is do you see it as a tool or potentially as a tool? You know I think someone mentioned the potential for distraction while they're using them because while you may be using the calculator function on the phone, there are other, obviously other kind of multitasking things that can be going on while the kids are using them. But we are seeing the emergence of a phone in the classroom as not just a phone but as a powerful little handheld computer on which the students can access all kinds of apps. Our special needs students, for example, lots of wonderful apps on the iPhones for them and we're kind of a Mac district. So you know we're able to integrate a lot of that with our iPads and our laptops. So there's a lot of work that can carry over from one platform—if you like—to another. So we are seeing teachers emerging this way. We're going to start teaching coding in this province. So kids are going to be involved even more with the technology. Some teachers are using them, for example in geography 12, they're using the GPA systems and mapping apps and whatnot for field trips and work outside the school. So there are lots of areas where they’re beginning to be appreciated as a little more than just an annoying phone on which the kids are texting or sexting or whatever they're doing. I mean we do have concerns about the social and emotional lives of the children in that you know we do know there's some bullying going on. We do know there’s some social pressure going on. We have had to take the grade eights and nines into the theatre and have talked with them about—particularly the boys—about you know accessing inappropriate images and whatnot. But there's also at the same time an emerging group—and it's not just young teachers, but I think it's probably mostly young teachers—who are willing to try some things with the phones and see if they can become normalized as part of the school classroom just the way that laptops and desktops on the table are.

AMT: I’m just wondering about the economic implications of that, when you start having a lot of apps on a smartphone. How many kids have access to that kind of thing? Is it as uniform as you make it sound?

PADDY MCCALLUM: No. And that's something we have to address. We have been trying to bolster the amount of access to laptops. We have carts of laptops and whatnot. Most schools do, so that the kids have lots of equal access. You know public schools, like my school, is an extremely diverse community of young people, very diverse both in terms of learning disabilities and abilities and socioeconomics. So we have to be conscious of the fact that the kids do not all have you know iPhone 6s. Some of them are working with you know different kinds of phones. Very few these days don't have phones. So this again is—you know I think my colleagues here on the program, they would agree with me—this is an evolving thing. It's not a fixed entity. We haven't reached some final point where we know what we're doing. The technology is increasing rapidly, particularly this last three or five years with the phones, the tablets, et cetera. So teachers are just—every teacher is struggling in their own way to try to adapt this somehow and figure out what their relationship with it will be.

AMT: Well, we're almost out of time but Michele Muzzi, maybe you can speak to a little bit of that in terms of—

MICHELE MUZZI: Yes. Well, I feel I try to create a space where people can contemplate and be present—both in my English classroom and in my drama classroom—and look each other in the eye and communicate in the old-fashioned way: reading and writing and acting and being present. And I find it's really not available. Children are not available if they're constantly allowed to or compelled to look at their cell phones and interact with whatever games they might be playing at that particular time. So I just try to create a space that's old-fashioned, I suppose I would call it. I think we're all grappling with this, as you say Paddy, and I really feel that it is so individual to the teacher how each person deals with it. I'm trying my darnedest to keep them out of my classroom but that doesn't necessarily mean that what you're doing—what you're doing sounds wonderful—it sounds very advanced and I applaud you for it.

AMT: Okay. Well, we have to leave it there. Thank you all for being part of this discussion.

MICHELE MUZZI: Thank you.

PADDY MCCALLUM: Thank you.

BRAYDEN PLUMMER: Thank you very much.

AMT: That's Michele Muzzi, English and drama teacher at Sir Wilfrid Laurier Collegiate Institute in Toronto. Paddy McCallum, media and literature teacher at Chatelech Community Secondary School in Sechelt, BC. Brayden Plummer, headmaster at Pretty River Academy, a private school in Collingwood, Ontario. We want your thoughts on this issue. If you're a student, a teacher, a parent, send us an email. Go to the site www.cbc.ca/thecurrent, click on the contact link. Find us on Facebook. Tweet us @thecurrentCBC. And keep listening. We've got more.

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Meet the black women who broke ground in NASA space race

Guests: Margot Lee Shetterly, Christine Darden

AMT: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

Oh, we just loved it. It was hard to do but when you got it, you got it. There was a right and wrong. See, in history there was no right and wrong. There was a visible objective in mathematics. And you knew when you got there.

AMT: That's Katherine Goble Johnson. She is 98 years old. She's reflecting on how her love of mathematics led her to a remarkable career, remarkable especially for a black woman of her era. Katherine Goble Johnson worked for NASA, making critical calculations that helped American astronauts return safely from the moon and space. She was helping the US advance in the space race even as the advance of civil rights was still being fought for at home. And she wasn't alone in all of this. She was a member of a group of black women in NASA known as the West Area Computers. Author Margot Lee Shetterly has set out to shed more light on their contributions. She's written a book called Hidden Figures and she joins us from Charlottesville, Virginia. Hello.

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: Hi Anna Maria. Thank you so much for having me.

AMT: Before we start, I just want to make one thing clear. When we talk about computers in “West Area Computers,” we're not talking about machines, are we?

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: We are not talking about machines. It's easy for us to think that in this day and age—when a computer is ubiquitous on our desktops and in our phones and even our toasters—that a computer always has been an appliance, when in fact a computer was a job category meaning somebody who computed, somebody whose profession was to do calculations, a professional mathematician. For many years, this person was usually a woman.

AMT: What types of work then, were the human computers doing?

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: In the particular case of the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia, what they were working on is aeronautical research: helping planes fly faster, higher, more efficiently and safer. A lot of the work that's done today by electronic computers—long calculations you know everything from simple but necessary arithmetic to differential equations, calculus, higher order math—that was done by women. This group of black women who came in and were working as computers were actually part of a larger group of black and white women.

AMT: And what was the relationship like between the women and the primarily white male engineers?

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: It varied depending on the engineer, but generally speaking, the engineer was the person who decided what problems there were to be solved, set up the research, whether it was in a wind tunnel or a plane that was flying you know an actual test flight or even space flight later on. But the engineer was the one who kind of set up the research and the problems and would give the mathematical work to the computer, to the woman who worked with them. Over time, a number of the women were able to do work more akin to engineering. Even if they had the title of computer or mathematician, they became partners in this work and even got their name on research reports. But it really did depend on the engineer and the engineer’s ability to see the talent in the person he was working with regardless of her gender or her colour.

AMT: Did the women always know what they were calculating for?

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: Frequently they didn't know. You know a woman might be working on a slice of that problem and might not actually know whether she was testing a bomber or a fighter plane or something else altogether. So very frequently, the women who were sort of the aeronautical ground troops didn't get the same picture that the generals you know the division chiefs and the people higher up and those engineers had of the work that they were doing.

AMT: And we heard Katherine Johnson off the top there. Despite being in a lower position as a mathematician than the engineers, she played a key role in America's race to space. In fact, there was a special request for her from John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth. What's the story there?

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: In 19—early 1960s, Project Mercury was in full bloom. This was America's first manned space program. Two successful missions had happened: Alan Shepard and then Gus Grissom. These were suborbital flights, so basically the capsule kind of goes into space, something like—imagine a champagne cork being popped and then just you know following a parabola and falling back to the earth. Well, John Glenn's flight was going to be a real ground-breaking mission because he was leaving the Earth's atmosphere, orbiting around the earth and coming back safely. This was a really interesting moment in space history because it was also a time when computers—electronic computers, not the female computers—were starting to take over from their human counterparts. Now you can imagine going into space is a risky endeavour and there's so many things to check and one of the things to do was to understand that the computer was functioning properly. So John Glenn asked Katherine Johnson to basically check the computer output, let's make sure that these numbers are correct. Get the girl to do it, that’s what he said. The girl being Katherine Johnson and girl being the name for basically all of the human computers at that time, they were called girls.

AMT: Of course they were.

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: Ask the girl to do it. You know these were the 19 you know 40s and 50s and 60s. Times have changed significantly. But get the girl to do it. If her calculations match those of the computers, well then, you know I'm satisfied and you know I'm ready to go into space.

AMT: That is a great story. So you make the point that women were doing this job and that there were white women and black women. They were actually segregated under the original system of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the NACA.

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: Yes. This was in Virginia, starting in the 1940s when the Jim Crow segregation laws were still very much in effect.

AMT: And so how did black women start getting those jobs?

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: It wasn't until World War II, you know a time of all hands on deck labour. And in 1941, a labour leader named A. Phillip Randolph essentially pressured President Roosevelt to open the federal government jobs, the civil service defense industry jobs to African-Americans. Two years after an executive order signed by Roosevelt, five black women walked through the door at the Langley Memorial Laboratory.

AMT: There were black men working there in a professional capacity at the time as well?

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: There were not actually. So the first black professionals to work at what became NASA were actually women. There were black men working there as groundskeepers, as mechanics, as janitors, all of that kind of thing. That is true. But it wasn't until the 1950s that the first black male engineers started taking jobs at Langley. So really, when we think about the first black Americans in the space program, we're talking about women.

AMT: Now millions of American women lost their jobs as the men came home after the war ended. How did the West Area Computers keep their jobs?

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: In fact, they did you know lay off a few employees, but the thing is the aeronautics industry was very strong you know and the airplane had played a very important role in the victory, of the Allied victory, in World War II. As soon as World War II ended, we kind of moved into the Cold War and the Cold War really ushered in a new era of airplanes and aeronautics and flying higher and you know even looking towards space flight.

AMT: Now there was segregation at the time. What was it like for those women at work?

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: Because of Virginia laws which required segregation, they worked in their own office. They had coloured bathrooms and they had a coloured section in the cafeteria.

AMT: It actually said that on the little label on the table, didn’t it?

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: There was actually a sign that said “coloured computers” in the cafeteria. And that was where they were required to sit during lunch.

AMT: You actually tell the story of one of the women who asked somebody else where the washrooms were.

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: Yes. Now this was in the 1950s. One of the women that I profile in my book is named Mary Jackson and Mary Jackson has the distinction of being the first black woman to be an engineer at NASA. She was promoted in 1958 to become a full aeronautical engineer. And it happened that one day she was working with a group of white computers and she asked them well, can you tell me where the bathroom is? And they kind of snickered because you know well, they said well, we don't know where your bathroom is, meaning the coloured bathroom. And you can imagine this was a real moment where this woman Mary Jackson—a well-educated professional doing very well in her job—was confronted with the ugly realities of Jim Crow segregation there in this very professional workplace. So you know it took a lot. I mean this—I think a lot of times we think about the courage that it takes to protest and to make changes. There are so many different ways to do that. And I think to go into a workplace like that every day—a segregated workplace—and to still do absolutely top notch professional work, it really takes a lot of guts and I think that you know the everyday courage of these women definitely created opportunities for women of all colours and for African-American men.

AMT: Why was a job there worth putting up with that kind of treatment?

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: Well, I think you know a lot of jobs required you know confronting that kind of treatment. You know I mean for most black—

AMT: It’s not like you could escape it at that time, is it?

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: You couldn’t escape it. This was a part of everyday life. Many black women worked in laundries. They worked in white people's homes. They did a lot of very difficult, dirty, often you know underpaid, underappreciated work. Having a job like this—a professional mathematician—for most of these women, you know and for women in general, not just black women but for all women who were talented mathematicians, who had studied math in school, the primary option was to become a math teacher. And so having a job as a professional mathematician and in one of the highest level scientific organizations in the world, well, I mean you know that truly was a door opening on an entirely new way of living and working. I mean this was a huge opportunity for these women and you know they were determined to do anything they could to keep those jobs.

AMT: A few years later, Mary Jackson has a confrontation with a white male boss, John Becker, who tells her that some calculations she has done are incorrect. What happens then?

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: Mary Jackson’s division chief John Becker had given her a set of numbers to compute. She did the work and she got the results and he questioned the numbers. They just didn't look right to him. So they went back and forth over the numbers and it turned out that he had actually given her the wrong data as input so her output was correct based on the input that he had given her. To his credit, you know he apologized to her and needless to say, Mary Jackson enjoyed an increase in status among all the female computers for you know basically facing down the big boss you know and someone who's very, very well known in the aeronautical research world and sticking to her guns. You know African-American woman in the still segregated South, and yet you know she had the soul of an engineer. That's one of the things that her immediate boss recognized about her and really supported her in terms of getting into an engineer and training program.

AMT: Margot Lee Shetterly, stay with us. We have someone else with us who has firsthand experience working at NASA. Christine Darden is African-American. She joined NASA in 1967. She worked primarily as a researcher and project manager, mostly in the field of sonic boom minimization. She is now retired. She's with us from Norfolk, Virginia. Hello. Hello.

CHRISTINE DARDEN: Hello. How are you today?

AMT: Well, I'm well. It's good to talk to you. Does listening to this bring back memories?

CHRISTINE DARDEN: It absolutely does. And I've actually learned a lot since Margot did her research and wrote her book.

AMT: Because you were the next, the next generation to come in.

CHRISTINE DARDEN: I was always much later than most of those ladies, yes.

AMT: Well, we were just talking about John Becker, the boss. You also had an encounter with Mr. Becker. What issue did you bring up with him?

CHRISTINE DARDEN: Well, I brought up the issue of a female coming in with a certain background—and when I went there, I had a master's degree in applied mathematics—being put into the computer pool which tended to be a fairly dead end as far as job progression, rather than in an engineering section where men with identical backgrounds were put and they began to work on their own projects and write reports and move ahead. And it turned out that a young black mathematician and I had been hired at the same time and he had come in at a lower grade than I had and had been promoted twice and I had not been promoted at all. I was doing pretty much work for someone else and I think my name only went on one report while I was in the computer office, you know sort of in a support role. I was second or third author. And so when I found that out, I really you know became dissatisfied and got enough energy to go approach Mr. Becker and ask because I had actually said things to some of the other bosses and they told me you know I couldn't move out, I couldn't do this. And he was supportive. I actually got a pretty fast promotion after my visit with him.

AMT: Now you also began studying for a doctorate in mechanical engineering while you were working there. What do you remember most about that?

CHRISTINE DARDEN: I didn't really know much when I went to Langley about what engineers did. And as they came into the office and I saw what they were working on, you know I said gosh, I ought to be able to do this. I had a physics minor, so I did start taking classes. One of the frightening things about it was that I knew I would be in school with primarily all-white males. That was frightening for me because I had grown up, all of my education had been in a segregated environment. As I was growing up, we always heard we were going to have to run really fast, faster than everybody else. We always heard that I guess white men were smarter than we were. That was sort of the attitude that was in the community. And so the idea of going into a class with them was sort of frightening but I said I'm going to do it. And sure enough when I went into my first class, there were about seven white males and me and I don't think anybody really spoke to me.

AMT: What year was that?

CHRISTINE DARDEN: That would have probably been about 1973.

AMT: Wow.

CHRISTINE DARDEN: ’73 or four, yeah. And so after the first test, I had done very well. And I guess we could see each other's papers sometimes. [chuckles] And so, a couple of the guys in the class came over and said hey, you know we were wondering if you'd be interested in joining our study group. And so I said sure, you know that would be great. And that sort of melted the relationship between me and the people in the class. And most of the folks you know I could talk with and we could discuss issues. Maybe one or two I never had much interaction with but I very much felt a part of the class after that.

AMT: Wow. You should see me smiling as you tell that story. Looking at it now, how big of an impact do you feel you and your black female colleagues were able to have on breaking the colour and gender barriers in math and science and engineering?

CHRISTINE DARDEN: Well, I absolutely think it's been tremendous and as I have heard and learned some recently about some of the things that they went through, I think it changed the attitude of the males. Most of the males that were there when we went there had not been in school with women. They certainly hadn't been in school with blacks. And so they just had an attitude of the capabilities of both the women and the blacks. And that came through in the environment. One difference that was made about the time I got there and maybe a little later is that the young men did have females in their classes. Certainly they had the white females so they were used to working with women. And then they began to work with black female engineers and black males too. And so we did see that attitude change especially in the engineering areas itself.

AMT: And you were really—you were so much a part then, of that whole change in attitudes of being able to show people why their attitudes needed to change.

CHRISTINE DARDEN: I was very much a part of it. I think in my own little area, sonic boom was one of the key environmental impediments to having supersonic airplanes. And so working in that area was fairly high profile, I developed one of the codes that was used to actually show us how maybe we could reduce that sonic boom and then I actually became a technical lead in that area leading the research that we were going to do. And ultimately, I sort of led a national group which included all the NASA centres, a lot of university professors.

AMT: Hmm. Christine Darden, it's really interesting to hear your story. Thank you for sharing it with us and thank you for your work.

CHRISTINE DARDEN: And thank you so much for having me.

AMT: That's Christine Darden. She's a retired NASA researcher and project manager. She joined us from Norfolk, Virginia. Margot Lee Shetterly is still with us. She is the author of Hidden Figures. I have to ask you Margot, how did black Americans view the link between the fight for civil rights and the space race?

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: You know for the people who knew about this and you know were close to this, they really saw this as a great thing. You know this is an area where you're either right or you're wrong. You can be technically excellent and use that as a way to advance in a job where you might not be able to do so when the criteria are more subjective. So you know I certainly grew up with that ethos of you know technical fields are a great thing for women, for you know, for everyone. You know but there was—certainly during the height of the space program—a lot of people questioned the expenditure on space and said you know we should be focusing on helping poor people, on helping African-Americans. Why are we spending you know all of this money to send a handful of men to the moon when we have so many problems on Earth?

AMT: And meanwhile, race and space were linked in the public imagination in another way. How did the Soviet Union use race relations in America as a propaganda tool?

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: Well, you know it is interesting because you know the civil rights movement and the space race happened at very much the same time: the 1950s and 1960s. The Soviet Union reflected all of those images of Little Rock and Selma to the world and said listen. Here is a country, the United States of America, that professes to be a democracy and to believe in equality for all of its citizens and yet, it does not practice what it preaches. And you need look no further than the pages of the newspapers and showing black Americans being denied education, being beaten in the streets. The United States—you know obviously very sensitive to its international image—did try to make some strides. But you know for some reason, these black women who had been there for so many years and then the black men who joined them in the 1950s, in a lot of ways they could have been the best antidote to those charges by the Soviet Union. And yet they sort of stayed in the shadows for many years.

AMT: Your book Hidden Figures is on the best sellers list. There's a movie version coming out next year with high-profile stars like Taraji P. Henson and Octavia Spencer. Why do you think this story is striking a chord right now?

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: Well, this issue of inclusion and our science workforce, it's something that's top of mind, you know? And it's really interesting for me because you know I dig into these documents in the National Archives and you know NASA memos from the 50s and 60s and we were having many of the same conversations about how do we get more black engineers? How do we get more female engineers? How will America be competitive if we don't take advantage of all of the talent in our country?

AMT: And throughout your research, how many black women did you discover who worked at the NACA or NASA in the middle of the 20th century?

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: I'm still doing that research. You know I think for me, you know I grew up in Hampton, Virginia so I knew a lot of these people growing up. You know I saw Christine Darden, I, you know went to school with her daughter. So I knew that they worked at NASA.

AMT: Your dad worked there too, didn’t he?

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: Exactly. My dad is a retired research scientist. So he spent his entire career there at NASA Langley. You know I was familiar with many of their names and faces but the biggest surprise to me was just how many women there were. I estimate—and I'm still really trying to put a fine point on this—I think that over the years, from you know 1943 through 1980, you know there may have been as many as 80 black women who had come and gone and spent time working as mathematicians at Langley and that they were part of a much larger cohort of black and white women that was several hundred and maybe more than a thousand. You know I think because a lot of these women were just doing their job, like if you ask Katherine Johnson how it felt to be a trailblazer and you know to do this very important work, she usually says you know I was just doing my job.

AMT: She liked math. [laughs]

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: She loved her job. She loved math. But you know I think that—that very sort of either you know humble or self-effacing or just normal-life aspect of these women and their relationship with the work that they did—because of that, it's only through the distance of years that we see what a significant impact that they had and you know that we see that there were so many more of them than we ever thought.

AMT: They were invisible, really.

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: Yeah. They were unseen.

AMT: To many. Yeah. To many.

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: Even in the black community in Hampton, you know people knew these women, knew the work that they were doing. But you know now we're sort of looking at each other and saying wow. You know now we get to sort of step back with the perspective of history and take in the fullness of everything that they did.

AMT: Do you think that what you have documented will inspire a new generation of girls and young black women—in a way that maybe they hadn't thought about—the potential and opportunities?

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: I hope so and I really think so. The thing is there are people doing this work. You know we obviously are having this discussion about how to have more women, how to have more African-Americans, more people of colour taking these careers. But you know I think one of the first things that we have to do, all of us, is to see the people who were there instead of looking past them. You know make them visible and say hey, this is what an engineer looks like. You know this is what a scientist looks like. This is what a mathematician looks like. And I think it's important, you know it's not just for the little black girls who need role models, but for little white boys who can see that you know this person likes science like me, you know? She likes Star Trek. And just because we look different or think we're from different backgrounds, we've got a lot in common, you know? So I think it really is about deconstructing these preconceived notions that we have about who gets to be a scientist.

AMT: Lots of layers to your book. Thank you for your work.

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: Thank you so much for having me on.

AMT: Margot Lee Shetterly. She's the author of Hidden Figures. It's a fabulous book. She joined us from Charlottesville, Virginia. As you listen to her and you want to share with us what you're thinking, you can tweet us. We are @thecurrentCBC. You can find us on Facebook or go right to our website www.cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the contact link. A book with some inspiration and encouragement, even beyond math and science students. That's our program for today. Now finally, we heard some different approaches to smartphones in the class today. We're going to leave you with the voices of some 12 year olds sharing how they feel about their phones. This is from a special series produced by the American Public Media outlet WNYC. It's called Being 12. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thank you for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: To be honest, on social media, it's kind of crazy.

VOICE 2: There's like a lot of bullying in Syria and like people post pictures of other people that make fun of them. They make comments. They comment on the pictures: “Oh, you’re ugly. You’re fake.”

VOICE 3: People are always like looking at people's photos and leaving negative comments.

VOICE 4: I'm not ready to get in trouble in social media. I'm trying to step it one done at a time.

VOICE 5: People getting in fights with each other, people calling each other out on social media, you know the usual for a 12 year old in sixth grade.

VOICE 6: You like my pictures? Like them. You don’t like them? Okay, don’t say anything. Or if you say anything, I don’t really care what you say. Like it’s my opinion and it’s my picture. You don’t like it? Who cares?

VOICE 7: I don’t want to get sucked into social media, in the lies and gossip. I don’t want to get sucked into that.

VOICE 8: Social media is not reality.

VOICE 9: I will prefer to play in the park because I don't like sitting home. I like to do stuff.

[Music: Ending theme]

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October 4, 2016 full episode transcript

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