“Three members of the National Council of Teachers of Math were appointed the responsibility to find someone who could talk to the whole National Council officialship about where this new thing, computers, is going to take the math curriculum. They wanted to find people who were doing things and bring them to the meeting in Washington. Well, I had three different letters from three different men that I didn’t know, who didn’t know me. They told me that all the other members were told to nominate me to give a speech on this topic. We didn’t have real computers there; we had programmable calculators. Monroe had 2,000 memory locations and it had its ability to graph. So I said, ‘I can do that. It sounds like fun. What are you, the National Council of Teachers of Math?’ I didn’t have any idea what they were. ‘We’re the organization of all math teachers in the United States and we set the curriculum …’ and on and on and on. I wrote this long presentation for the Monroe calculator and its plotter.
“So I went to Washington, DC, and I handed him my speech. I was going to prove to them that, if studying geometry was only to develop logical thinking, the programming of a computer does every bit of that and even more. Well, the guy, I guess he was one of the big shots, contacted me when I got there and said we don’t want you to give your speech. I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘We’re studying math, not computers, and we don’t want you to give this speech, where you are suggestion that geometry be supplanted by computer programming.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you know, I worked very hard on this speech and I’m going to give it. I’m on the program. I see my name right there and I’m going to give that speech.’ I was really mad. I gave my speech. I showed how I could program all the exigencies. I challenged them to give me a linear equation or a quadratic equation I couldn’t solve correctly and produce a graph of it.
“I don’t know what they thought I was doing. To program something that can catch all the exceptions that show up in mathematics and take care of it was to me magical. Later on, I discovered he wouldn’t even give my speech a nod in the proceedings of the meeting. But three people came up to me — math professors from universities — one was Columbia — and one was from the National Science Foundation. And the guy from Columbia said, ‘You really have balls. You actually talked back to the hierarchy.’ I said, ‘What hierarchy?’ He said, ‘The guy that told you not to do this.’ I said, ‘I didn’t know he was hierarchy. And I don’t care. I’m not a member of this organization.’ He looked at me and said, ‘You better join.’
“Then another guy came to me, introduced his name, and he said, ‘I am a member of the National Science Foundation professional staff.’ I said, ‘I’ve heard of the National Science Foundation. What do you do?’ He smiled. He said, ‘You’re refreshing. Everyone knows what we do and are dying to get on our board and you don’t even know who we are and we are going to ask you to be on our Board.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘We decide the direction mathematics should take, by giving money to research projects that we think will be useful. And we would like you to serve three years on the Board.’ I said, ‘What other high school teachers do you have?’ He said, ‘Oh, you’re the only one. The rest are all college professors that write the books that math people use.’ So, I thought that was fun.
“I got back here and I went downtown to the Superintendent and I said, ‘I accepted, but I don’t have that many days free.’ He says, ‘You know what, if you can affect the National Science Foundation, you have every day you want.’ So, I got to go for three-day meetings, three times a year for three years. I got to meet the most amazing people in the world. I had lunch with a gal who was in charge of admissions at MIT, to find out why I couldn’t get a kid into MIT. After that meeting, I got a couple and I met the Presidential Mathematics Advisor. I learned that his science advisor was my student that I had first taught computers to. He had a doctorate from Yale; I didn’t know I had such bright kids. I should have known. But I didn’t think I was so bright. I got to work on Sesame Street’s grant. I had to fight for that. They didn’t understand that little kids from families that don’t have anything don’t have the advantage of any kind of learning at all. And that affects their whole life. Nobody reads them stories; nobody even tries to teach them the alphabet. We also put in a junior high one, too. But, boy, did they give me a lousy bed to sleep on.”