Today is Ada Lovelace Day, honoring a woman who is often credited with being the first computer programmer because of her work programming for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine in the 1840s. The day honors Ada and all women who are involved in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
I am not a woman in a STEM field, not really. But I am celebrating Ada Lovelace Day today because I am the humanities scholar I am through the influence of a woman who did work in STEM—my mom. So I’d like to celebrate Ada Lovelace Day 2014 by honoring my mom.
My mom was an elementary school teacher for the first part of her adult life. Once she had kids, she transitioned to writing elementary-school textbooks for a small press, a role she maintained for the rest of her life. Though she worked on a variety of projects, her favorite, and her longest-running project, was the elementary science curriculum. Writing these textbooks gave her the chance to incorporate into a curriculum the experiments and explorations she had always done with us kids at home. We got to look at eclipses through little holes in paper, and collect animal tracks using plaster. We were always being subjected to discussions about how best to demonstrate viscosity, or the most interesting way to talk about the distance between planets, or the kid-friendliest way to learn about civil engineering. And all of these household discussions worked their way into her textbooks.
I didn’t always appreciate my mom’s emphasis on science and mathematics. I used to cringe when she’d give me two similar items in the grocery store and ask me to figure out which one was the better deal, based on their price and weight (this was before the stores so helpfully printed the “unit price” on the price tag). Or she would play games with me to estimate how much our total grocery bill would be based on my having to keep track of all the items’ prices in my head.
When I was a teenager, I worked for the same press as my mom, and though I worked in a different department, I sometimes got outsourced to her as a researcher and writer. She gave me a vast array of different assignments, like writing about autonomous underwater vehicles, or atmospheric optics, for a call-out page in a 5th-grade science textbook. Initially I wasn’t that excited about some of the topics, but I ended up catching her enthusiasm and digging in.
In a few weeks, it will be the fourth anniversary of my mom’s death. She was able to finish the entire elementary school science curriculum before becoming too sick to work. That’s one scientific legacy. But the legacy is more personal, too. I still find myself wishing I could call her when I see things like halos around the sun, or an oddly colored insect, because I know that she would most appreciate the beauty of a random scientific phenomenon.
My whole family has been inspired by my mom’s legacy. In fact, of four kids, I’m the only one who doesn’t have some sort of higher education in a STEM field. Three of the four of us are working on PhDs (and the fourth is still in college—the bar’s pretty high, Auria…). My latent mathematician has been coming out recently as I get into digital humanities, but the very way I think about knowledge and research–even as a historian—comes from my mom. Both of my parents have always encouraged us to educate ourselves, both officially and unofficially. Both my mom and my dad have always pushed us to excel as far as we can, while supporting us along the way. But today, Ada Lovelace Day, I want to honor the one woman in a STEM field who has meant the most to me and has shaped my life more than anyone else. I love you, Joyce Garland. You’re the best role model I could ever have.