I am grateful that Aunt Vone, a math teacher in the Norfolk public school system for 35 years, is here with us today. As a sixth grader growing up on a college campus, I had always understood academics as essentially split between the hard sciences the women in my family taught and the humanities. Sadie T.M.
Alexander's work imparted three important lessons that would act as a compass. First, she helped me discover the world of social sciences, an academic middle ground with the structure of the hard sciences and the seemingly infinite research possibilities it contained. Second, she showed me not just what could be studied, but what kind of questions should be asked.