![]() I always knew how many of everything there were. Mama was very well organized, but my mind took her sense of order one step further. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight plates. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight forks. That was just the way that my mind worked. Me at age two with my brothers and sister. The number of times the train engineers blew the whistle as they traveled through the trees, echoing off the granite bedrock that rose above us and formed the valley within which our town, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, was nestled. No matter what I did, I was always finding something to count: the floorboards, the cracks in the sidewalk, the trees as I walked by, the train cars stacked with timber and those piled with coal that lumbered along the edge of our town each day. It turned out that I was very gifted in math. The truth of the matter was that I was fast. I would be well into adulthood before I discovered that the issue wasn’t that he was slow. At least, that’s what I thought back then. We even lived in a home he had built for us.Ĭharlie was two years older than me, but for some reason he seemed to be a little slow. He was so good that he could look at an entire oak, pine, or even a chestnut tree, and tell you how many logs it would yield once it had been cut down. Envisioning things was one of his strong points. He may have had only a sixth-grade education, but he was really good with figures. Once you understand the background of any idea, you can figure any problem out for yourself.”ĭaddy’s personality could be more comforting than Mama’s. “We just have to explain it so that you get it. “I can’t figure it out,” Charlie said, his lack of confidence evident in his voice. “Let’s see what we can do here, Son,” he said, sitting down and scooting closer to his youngest son, the chair scraping loudly across the oak floor.ĭaddy put his left arm around Charlie, who leaned into him. More than six feet tall, he towered above most everyone. Our father was a little more relaxed.ĭaddy set the paper down and slowly unfurled himself from his favorite chair. Mama adored us, but she was very orderly and from time to time she could be a bit strict. “Maybe you can explain it better than I can, Josh,” Mama said to Daddy, who was sitting in the front room reading the White Sulphur Sentinel, our town’s newspaper. Horace and Margaret were steadily scribbling away at their assignments, apparently unbothered by Charlie’s challenges. “Sit up straight,” Mama had told him, and he did. She should have been able to help him figure out his schoolwork.īut the way he had slumped over onto one elbow had signaled that he was feeling frustrated. ![]() Back before she’d had Horace, Margaret, Charlie, and me, she had been a teacher. I kept revisiting the scene at the kitchen table the night before, when he’d struggled with his math homework.įirst Mama had tried to assist him with it. ![]() As I sat at the kitchen table still fiddling with my oatmeal, I couldn’t get my brother Charlie out of my mind. Moments earlier Daddy had left for work and my brothers and sister had set off to school. Except for the sound of Mama humming and the clinking of dishes as she washed them in the sink, the house was quiet. ![]() It’s not every day you wake up with a mission on your mind, but I had a mission and I was determined to accomplish it. Now in Reaching for the Moon she tells her own story for the first time, in a lively autobiography that will inspire young readers everywhere. Katherine Johnson’s story was made famous in the bestselling book and Oscar-nominated film Hidden Figures. She worked on many of NASA’s biggest projects including the Apollo 11 mission that landed the first men on the moon. In the early 1950s, Katherine was thrilled to join the organization that would become NASA. Still, she lived her life with her father’s words in mind: “You are no better than anyone else, and nobody else is better than you.” As an African American and a girl growing up in an era of brutal racism and sexism, Katherine faced daily challenges. But ability and opportunity did not always go hand in hand. In school she quickly skipped ahead several grades and was soon studying complex equations with the support of a professor who saw great promise in her. The inspiring autobiography of NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, who helped launch Apollo 11.Īs a young girl, Katherine Johnson showed an exceptional aptitude for math. “Captivating, informative, and inspiring…Easy to follow and hard to put down.” - School Library Journal (starred review) “This rich volume is a national treasure.” - Kirkus Reviews (starred review) ![]()
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