Full Steam Ahead

MOUNT ST. MARY ACADEMY TURNS 171 THIS YEAR, BUT YOU WOULDN’T KNOW IT TOURING HER HALLS AND CLASSROOMS. Everywhere you look, you see blinking monitors and newfangled teaching aids with a cutting-edge curriculum that speaks to the latest in the sciences and technology, balanced by a healthy dose of the arts.

It’s called STEAM education (science, technology, engineering, arts, math), and few schools do it better than the Mount. Every year, hundreds of well-rounded, highly educated graduates emerge from the academic rigor of this curriculum, ready to continue their educational journey and take their place as the leaders of tomorrow.

From left: Seniors Rosa Rivera, Gracie Limmer, Macy Ramiro, Millie Allgood, Phoebe Johnson and Mary Claire Thomas are better prepared for their futures in an ever-evolving world thanks to their STEAM education at Mount.

Photo by Jason Masters

“STEAM fields have expanded greatly in a short period of time and are a desirable field for many of our graduates,” said Sara Jones, MSM principal. “As a result, we see STEAM as vital to our role in preparing our girls to enter the workforce with relevant knowledge that will allow them prime opportunities for growth.

“We have utilized the STEAM approach for many years through a curriculum that teaches real-world applications. Our departments have designed crosscurricular projects to enhance connections among fields of content, and MSM is committed to creating more STEAM learning opportunities for our students through additional programs and relevant curriculum revision.”

While science and the arts are often considered diametrically opposed to one another, Mount educators have proven this is not the case. Jenny Moses should know; the school’s speech and theatre instructor is a former math teacher, giving her a front-row seat to the developmental interplay between the disciplines.

“I think science and the arts dovetail nicely together; they strengthen each other,” she said. “If I am looking at it from a mathematics standpoint, sometimes we get so analytic and linear with our mathematical processes that we forget the way to find solutions is to use creativity and to think of problems in a different way. Creativity in approaching math problems is extremely important in these cases.

“Coming at it from the art side, you can be as creative as you want to be, but unless you’ve got some logic and some ability to think linearly, you’re not going to get it to the stage. That can be literally building some stairs and needing to be able to figure out the geometry to make it happen, or scheduling and keeping everybody on track.”

Gabriella Angtuaco ’23 said she came into Mount St. Mary more science-focused, but her high school arts experience has her now thinking of possibly pursuing music once she gets to college. She said the quality of the instruction has helped improve her as a student in other ways, too.

Mary Claire Thomas ’22 (left) and Millie Allgood ’22 in one of Mount’s science labs.

Photo by Jason Masters

“It helps me to be more well-rounded, so I can look at things from several different perspectives, which I find to be very important,” she said. “I’ve figured out what my passions are, and more than that, being more well-rounded and seeing things from different perspectives shows me I don’t just have to be one thing.

“Mount St. Mary has a great nurturing environment, so you can really feel at home. You feel more comfortable stepping out and doing other things you haven’t done before. I think that has really helped me grow as a person.”

Carrie Burkhead, technology and media specialist, has also witnessed this interplay through student projects that leverage both sides of the student brain.

“Students putting together a news program for the school learn problem-solving skills,” she said. “Critical thinking is essential to the process; they have to be very resourceful. They go through the creative process of writing the script, and when the anchors review it, if it doesn’t make sense, they will edit the script.”

The school has leveraged this melded technology and creativity in various ways in school operations, as well. Acceptance letters to prospective students is one example.

“This is maybe our fourth year of sending an acceptance video from our principal instead of a traditional acceptance letter,” Burkhead said. “We personalize it to the recipient, and my multimedia students put together a B-roll at the end showing a day in the life at MSM. I provide some guidance there, but it’s completely student-produced.”

Savanna Jaros ’22 (right) and Sophia Gonzalez ’22 painting in a studio art class.

Photo courtesy of MSM

Keeping the curriculum ahead of the curve can be challenging, given how dynamic and expensive these fields can be. Still, MSM has shown a commitment to that process. After volunteering for 15 years as a cross country coach, Captain Scott Pursley has reinstated the school’s robotics program, which has been inactive for several years, in his first year on MSM’s chemistry and physics faculty.

“Our girls are going to learn by doing. For students to understand the science of something, they first have to handle it,” he said. “That’s why, with the Robotics Club we’re bringing back this fall, I’m not so much interested in entering larger competitions, because they tend to require teams of 15 kids working on one robot. Well, you know what’s really going on? It’s really just one kid working on the robot, or maybe two, and the other 13 aren’t learning much at all.

“The trick with robotics and technology is you want the kids to teach each other. So the approach I’m going to take is each kid has a robot. She’s going to have to build it and code it and encounter those failures that naturally occur. And she’s going to come to me, ‘Captain Pursley, please fix my program!’ And I’m going to say, ‘Go talk to Susie. She’s fixed that problem. She’ll show you how to do it.’”

Pursley’s tough-love approach to academics falls right in step with the school’s philosophy of teaching students how to think as more important than memorization of material. Robin Kanatzar ’09, a software engineer with Betclic living in France, could not agree more.

“The best thing MSM taught me was how to learn new material quickly and efficiently,” she said. “In honors and IB classes, we constantly had new material we had to learn in a short period of time. Knowing how to do that has been invaluable for me in my career because the world of software and technology changes so rapidly. There’s always something new to absorb and master.

Justin Brady, math instructor, using one of the school’s interactive Promethean Boards to teach algebra.

Photo courtesy of MSM

“This skill also came in handy when I moved to France and had to learn the language as quickly as possible. Books say you learn a new language at a rate of about five words a day, but during my first six months in France, it felt more like 20. For a while there, my apartment was covered in piles of French flashcards.”

Summer Khairi ’12 is another alumna who said the Mount’s approach, combined with a challenging STEAM curriculum, helped her grow in ways that are still invaluable to her career where she is assistant professor and clinical coordinator for UAMS in Little Rock.

“I already knew that I liked science and math before I got to the Mount, but they taught me more than that,” she said. “The Mount really taught me how to study, and they made me really good at time management. I was in basketball and soccer in high school, and they were like, ‘Well great, but you still have to get good grades to play those sports.’

“No one’s just going to do stuff for you; you have to put yourself in some uncomfortable situations if you want to excel. That really helped me organize my life, and as a result, I’ve been way more prepared for college and my career compared to all my friends who didn’t go to Mount.”

Principal Jones said one of the most powerful elements of the Mount’s curriculum is a dedicated complement of alumnae willing to provide mentoring and advisement that are so critical to women in STEAM professions.

Phoebe Johnson ’22 (left) and Veronica Simon ’22 coding and operating two robots with an iPad.

Photo by Jason Masters

“Women make up a little more than a quarter of those employed in STEAM fields, and there are relatively few female role models in STEAM careers,” she said. “This can lead to decreased confidence in those subjects that lend themselves well to success in STEAM, such as math. We make a concerted effort to connect our girls with alumnae in these fields and show them that these career paths are possible in spite of being historically male-dominated.”

Millie Allgood ’22 is planning to pursue a medical career after graduation. She said such input from alumnae is an extension of what she considers the most valuable aspect of the Mount’s learning environment.

“The thing that I really appreciate about the all-girls environment, in comparison to a coed environment, is that everybody’s on the same page,” she said. “At Mount, the teachers want you in their AP classes; it’s not some exclusive club that only the smartest of the smart can be in. So every girl is there to learn and to get better, and it’s a lot easier to find a learning community that wants to help each other when everybody has that mindset.

“This is important because a big part of the AP program at Mount is teamwork. I don’t think I did a single project by myself; it was always that you were working with others and everybody was putting in the work. You’re not having to do your part and half of someone else’s part. When everybody is putting in that maximum effort, you get the maximum outcome.”