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Math mapping. African American mathematician Benjamin Banneker surveyed the land that is now the District of Columbia, laying out the streets on a grid similar to the x and y axes of the graph of an algebraic equation. That's the lesson that Tom Bullock, director of Georgetown University's Institute for College Preparation, shares with Gabrielle Alston, a student at Ronald H. Brown Middle School, during a Saturday Academy math class on the university campus.
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Every Saturday morning, a band of determined middle and high school students make their way from the mean streets of Washington, D.C.'s Deanwood neighborhood—where in May this year an 8-year-old girl was killed by a stray bullet during a streetfight—to Georgetown University. Both literally and metaphorically, it's a long trip. Some students leave home before 7 a.m. and have to take two or three buses to get there. For some, the trip across town takes them as far west as they have ever gone. continued...
Story and photo: Jennifer Boeth Donovan
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Reprinted from the HHMI Bulletin,
Summer 2004, pages 40-41.
©2004 Howard Hughes Medical Institute
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