Aufgabe Vorschlag B2 - Aufgabe 3.1 · Abitur Hessen Englisch LK 2021

Material

Katherine Johnson died on February 24 th (obituary, 2020)

As she ran her eyes over the flight-test calculation sheets the engineer had given her, Katherine Goble

(as she then was) could see there was something wrong with them. The engineer had made an error

with a square root. And it was going to be tricky to tell him so. It was her first day on this assignment,

when she and another girl had been picked out of the computing pool 1 at the Langley aeronautical

5 laboratory, later part of NASA 2, to help the all-male Flight Research Unit. But there were other, more

significant snags than simply being new.

Most obviously, he was a man and she was a woman. In 1953 women did not question men. They

stayed in their place, in this case usually the computing pool, tapping away on their Monroe desktop

calculators 3 or filling sheets with figures, she as neatly turned out as all the rest. Men were the grand

10 designers, the engineers; the women were “computers in skirts”, who were handed a set of equations

and exhaustively, diligently checked them. Men were not interested in things as small as that.

And, most difficult of all, she was Coloured, and he was White. The lab might be recruiting black

mathematicians, but the door was not fully open; her pool was called “Coloured Computing” and was

segregated. As she sat down with the new team that morning, the men next to her had moved away.

15 She was not sure why, but the world was like that, and she refused to be bothered by it. Since the café

was segregated, she ate at her desk. There was no Coloured restroom, so she used the White one. A

few years back, when the bus taking her to her first teaching job in Marion, Virginia, had crossed the

state line from West Virginia, all the blacks had been told to get off and take taxis. She refused until

she was asked nicely. But it could be unwise to push a white man too far.

20 Nonetheless, this engineer’s calculation was wrong. If she did not ask the question, an aircraft might

not fly, or might fly and crash. So, very carefully, she asked it. Was it possible that he could have

made a mistake? He did not admit it but, by turning the colour of a cough drop 4, he ceded the point.

She asked more such questions, and they got her noticed. As the weeks passed, the men “forgot” to

return her to the pool. Her incessant “Why?” and “How?” made their work sharper. It also challenged

25 them. Why were their calculations of aerodynamic forces so often out? Because they were maths

graduates who had forgotten their geometry, whereas she had not; her high-school brilliance at maths

had led to special classes on analytic geometry in which she, at 13, had been the only pupil. Why was

she not allowed to get her name on a flight-trajectory report when she had done most of the work,

filling her data sheets with figures for days? Because women didn’t. That was no answer, so she got

30 her name on the report, the first woman to be so credited. […]

As NASA’s focus turned from supersonic flight to flights in space, she was therefore deeply involved,

though still behind the scenes. […] She ensured that Alan Shepard’s Mercury capsule 5 splashed down

where it could be found quickly in 1961, and that John Glenn 6 in 1962 could return safely from his

first orbits of the Earth. […]

35 Later she calculated the timings for the first Moon landing (with the astronauts’ return) and worked on

the Space Shuttle. She also devised a method by which astronauts, with one star observation checked

against a star chart, could tell where they were. But in the galaxy of space-programme heroes, despite

her 33 years in the Flight Research Unit, for a long time she featured nowhere.

It did not trouble her. First, she also had other things to do: raise her three daughters, cook, sew their

40 clothes, care for her sick first husband. Second, she knew in her own mind how good she was – as

good as anybody. She could hardly be unaware of it, when she had graduated from high school at 14

and college at 18, expert at all the maths anyone knew how to teach her. But she typically credited the

help of other people, especially her father, […] who had sold the farm and moved the family so that

she and her siblings could all get a fine schooling and go to college. And last, at NASA, she had not

45 worked alone. She had been one of around a dozen black women mathematicians who were equally

unknown. But when their story emerged in the 21st century, most notably in a book and a film called

“Hidden Figures”, she had a NASA building named after her, a shower of honorary doctorates and –

the greatest thrill – a kiss from Barack Obama as he presented her, at 96, with the Presidential Medal

of Freedom.

50 This attention was all the more surprising because, for her, the work had been its own reward. She just

did her job, enjoying every minute. The struggles of being both black and a woman were shrugged

away. Do your best, she always said. Love what you do. Be constantly curious. And learn that it is not

dumb to ask a question; it is dumb not to ask it. Not least, because it might lead to the small but

significant victory of making a self-proclaimed superior realise he can make a mistake.

(924 Wörter)

Katherine Johnson died on February 24 th, 27.02.2020, in: The Economist, URL: https://www.economist.com/obituary/2020/02/27/katherine-johnson-died-on-february-24th (abgerufen am 05.05.2020).

Annotations

1 pool – here: a group of employees

2 NASA – the American governmental agency that plans and carries out the space programme

3 Monroe desktop calculators – Monroe is the name of a company that produces small calculators.

4 cough drop – a candy-like medicine for coughing, usually in a bright red color

5 Alan Shepard’s Mercury-capsule – Alan Shepard was the first American astronaut to go into space. After completing his mission, he landed inside a small part of the rocket in the ocean.

6 John Glenn was the first American astronaut to orbit the earth.

3.1

Taking the example of Katherine Johnson as a starting point (Material), write an article for a magazine aimed at graduates of an American women's college commenting on the status of women in contemporary American society.

(30 BE)