Santa Catalina is a private high school in Monterey, California, with about 250 students who are all girls. When I first came as a freshman, I was surprised to see one female teacher-- Ms. Noova Ongley-- in the math department. She turned out to be my Honors Precalculus teacher for that year. Now, two years have passed, more female teachers have been added to the department, and Ms. Ongley is currently my AP Calculus BC teacher.

I have always wondered what it would be like to have such a large impact on many girls as a female math teacher, when math is a male-dominated field, and girls tend to get discouraged on the subject from a young age. In class, Ms. Ongley is always patient with us and waits for us to understand, no matter how long it might take. She uses easy language to explain a hard concept for us, and when we solve problems, she discusses with us about different ways to approach a problem instead of just giving us the answer. That is how I developed respect for Ms. Ongley, and why I decided to interview her.

Her fascination with math seemed to be influenced by a female math teacher, Ms. Michelle Peterson, whose teaching style was appealing because she was well-rounded and showed that you didn’t have to be a “math nerd” in order to like math. She had her for all four years in Glennallen high school in Glennallen, Alaska. Although she had always liked math, she didn’t realize she would be teaching it until she worked as a TA in University of California, Santa Cruz, her graduate school. After then, she was a private math tutor teaching high school students. She came to Santa Catalina in 2004 because when she was tutoring, she didn’t like how her students had been taught in school and wanted to teach students herself. She said that she’d been the only female teacher in the department for many years.

Ms. Ongley was born in Finland, and grew up in Michigan, Chicago, and Alaska. Her family was the opposite of what one would typically call a “STEM” family- her father was a librarian, her mother was a linguist, and her sister studied journalism and English. However, even though they were not science- centered, they always supported her pursuits in math. She says that her mother, though, is good at math, and that maybe that’s because math and linguistics use the same part of the brain. 

However, her amicability towards math had not caused her to become a math major right away. She had always liked math during high school, but she started out as a German major in University of Hawaii at Manoa. That was because she had to declare a major that was not offered in her state in order to go to school in another state and not have to pay out of state tuition. There, she was a German major for 2 years and for another year after transferring to Humboldt State University. She had been continuously taking math classes, but she officially switched to Math major in her last year at Humboldt State, and got the undergraduate degree.

She had an important observation when she had first started college in Hawaii. She said that there was not a single female professor in the math department, while there were so many male professors that it almost seemed like there were fifty of them. They did not have a women’s bathroom in the building, so they would have to go to a different building. It surprised her that the male professors were not exactly shy about saying that they liked it that way. That was in the 90s, and that was the first time that it occurred to her that math was a “boy’s thing”.

We addressed a common misconception that boys are better at math or science biologically. However, Ms. Ongley says that this is completely false. She advises girls like myself, who want to pursue math, not to listen to discouragements or misunderstood comments. She says to prove them wrong by working extra hard, but not to focus on beating the boys and always being the top of class, but just to show them that you can do it too. Also, she emphasizes that you should keep going even if you end up doing math somewhere without a women’s bathroom.

She has a clear teaching philosophy on math. She believes that teachers can have a great impact on students’ perspective on math from a very young age. I was intrigued that she thinks the math curriculum for younger students should be more rigorous and more enjoyable. She told a story of a teacher who marked a kid wrong when they were sorting out shapes and the kid said that a square was a rectangle. That was because the teacher was not thinking about the technical definition of a square, which would have deemed the kid correct. Due to unenthusiastic math teaching methods like this, many kids lose interests and will to solve problems at fractions.

She hopes that there will be more career opportunities for female teachers in the field of mathematics, like how the number of female teachers in our school’s department increased over the last two years. Not only has she gained two more female colleagues, but there are more role models and influences for us to look at whenever we have doubts about our abilities in math. Thanks to her, we know that we should always keep going even after we leave an all girls’ environment or maybe even end up someplace without a women’s bathroom.