Why did Wichita students form a club to study math? ‘You get to be smart’

At 5:30 Monday night, most kids were sitting down to dinner or getting home from practice or maybe grudgingly starting their homework.

But in a small office building in downtown Wichita, 11 girls were sitting down for a math lesson — and looking forward to it.

Before the lesson even started, the girls were challenging each other, writing equations on the board and shooting questions back and forth, calculators at the ready. When they got their worksheet for the night, they immediately sat down and got to work, no directions needed.

The girls are members of the Katherine Johnson Scholar Sisters, a Wichita math club for African-American girls in elementary school.

The club is named for NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, one of the subjects of “Hidden Figures,” the new film about some of the first black women to join the space agency.

“Ideally, we’d love for some of them to become Katherine Johnsons,” said William Polite, the girls’ instructor. “The ultimate goal is that some of them will someday get STEM scholarships.

“But, as long as they continue with their education, I’ll be happy.”

Polite runs the Build and Rebuild Math Academy in downtown Wichita, where the club has been meeting twice a week since September. During that time, the students have received free math lessons from Polite beyond what they’re getting in school, like coordinate planes and integers.

Polite and the club’s coordinator, Janice Hardeman, have big goals for the club, from building the girls’ confidence to getting them into a middle school STEM program to allowing them to earn math degrees.

But all the girls say they like the club for one simple reason.

“It’s fun,” said 9-year-old Phoenix Neely. “We get to learn math.”

Another member of the club, Phallin Jackson, said she likes math because “You get to be smart.”

And the girls are getting smarter, Polite said, advancing quickly through the lessons. He’s about to start teaching sixth-grade algebra to the fourth- and fifth-graders, a move he hopes will put them on track to get a year – or even two years – ahead in math by the time they go to high school.

But the club isn’t all about the lessons. The girls have social events, and they’re hoping to attend STEM conferences in Kansas City and, if they can raise enough money, Atlanta.

“You’ve got to mix in a little bit of the fun,” said Hardeman, whose daughter is in the club.

Last week, they went to “Hidden Figures” on opening night to see the namesake of their club represented on the big screen. Rah’leah James said she liked the movie, but some parts made her “kind of sad.”

“Katherine Johnson had to run a mile to go the bathroom because there wasn’t a colored one nearby,” Rah’leah said. “She had to run in the rain and miss a bunch of work and stay super late at night.”

Now, the girls are preparing to meet another influential black woman, this time with a Kansas connection. Next month, University of Kansas Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little, the first black and first female chancellor of KU, will visit the club as a guest speaker.

To raise money for the camp in Atlanta, the club is having a farewell dinner for Gray-Little in conjunction with her visit; she is retiring from KU this summer.

If the girls go to the camp – a week-long, girls-only program put on by the Society of Black Engineers in Georgia – they also will make a stop to see the “first” namesake of Katherine Johnson, the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility (they consider themselves the “second”).

“They’re so excited to ‘meet’ her,” Hardeman said.

For Rah’leah James, Johnson is “inspiring,” and it all comes down to one thing:

“We want to do math like her.”

This story was originally published January 14, 2017 at 3:21 PM with the headline "Why did Wichita students form a club to study math? ‘You get to be smart’."