2/18/2027

Morning Announcements

Morning Meeting Agenda

Mon · Social Studies Tue · Literacy Wed · Science Thu · Math Fri · ROAR + Houses
Kindness Week continues — keep those acts of kindness going!
Math · Kindness Week Day 3

Two numbers can find you anywhere

Every phone map, every GPS, every delivery driver finding your house — all of it runs on coordinates. And the math that made it possible came from someone almost nobody had heard of.

Photo of Dr. Gladys West Photo credit: [add if license requires]

Meet Dr. Gladys West! She was a mathematician who did math to help figure out the exact shape of the Earth. Her math helps every map app know where you are!

To find a spot on a map, you need two numbers: how far across, and how far up. Let’s try it!

A grid showing how to find a star by counting across 3 and up 2
Let’s talk
  • Let’s find the star together! Count across, then count up.
  • Why do you need BOTH numbers? What if you only had one?
  • Has your family ever used a map on a phone to find a place?
Reveal the answerHide the answer
With only ONE number you’d know the row, but not where in the row! You need both to find the exact spot. Dr. West’s math helps satellites do this for the whole Earth!
Try it

Classroom coordinates! Count how many desks across and how many rows back YOU are sitting. Say your two numbers out loud — that’s your coordinate!

Quote of the day: “You’re not thinking, ‘What impact is this going to have on the world?’ You’re thinking, ‘I’ve got to get this right.’”

Who said it?Hide
Photo of Dr. Gladys West Photo credit: [add if license requires]

Dr. Gladys West — born in rural Virginia in 1930, she graduated top of her class and became a mathematician at a Navy lab in 1956, one of only four Black employees there. Her mathematical model of Earth’s true shape became foundational to GPS. She worked 42 years, earned a PhD at about 70, and was finally honored in 2018. She died in 2026 at age 95.

Earth isn’t a perfect sphere — gravity and tides distort it. West used complex math to model that real, lumpy shape. Without an accurate model, satellite positions would be wrong.

A coordinate grid showing how an ordered pair locates one exact point, and how GPS extends this idea
Let’s talk
  • Why does the ORDER of the two numbers matter? Is (4, 3) the same point as (3, 4)?
  • West said she wasn’t thinking about world impact — just getting it right. How is that its own kind of kindness toward strangers?
  • Her work was completed in the 1970s and 80s, but she wasn’t publicly honored until 2018. Should recognition matter to whether work is worth doing?
Reveal the answersHide the answers
Order absolutely matters — (4, 3) and (3, 4) are different points. That’s why they’re called ordered pairs, and it’s exactly why GPS coordinates must be given in a fixed order. West’s quote is Kindness Week in one sentence: she did careful, exacting work for people she would never meet, without expecting anything back — the ultimate version of yesterday’s “kindness nobody sees.” And on recognition: the work helped billions whether or not anyone knew her name, but the 40-year delay wasn’t neutral either — she was repeatedly passed over for promotions given to white male colleagues. The work mattered regardless. The delay was still an injustice.
Try it

Coordinate battleship! With a partner, each secretly mark three points on a 6×6 grid. Take turns guessing coordinates to find each other’s points. Get the order wrong and you’ll miss — which is exactly the point.

Additional Notes/Activities

If additional activities are needed for the Morning Meeting, they will be added here.