Empowering Girls in STEM: Dr. Leslie Gruis’s NSA to Education Journey

Speaker 1 (00:12.174)

Hello everybody and welcome to the TeacherCast educational network. name is Jeff Bradbury. Thank you so much for joining us today and making TeacherCast your home for professional development. On today's episode of Digital Learning today, we're gonna be talking to a fantastic guest all about her career in the NSA, some of the secrets that she has about the world and how she right now is on a mission to help girls learn a little bit more about STEM, particularly in the middle school year. So stick around, we have a fantastic conversation ahead of us today.

the first time you're checking out our show, don't forget to head on over to Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Hit that like and subscribe. And of course, all of our videos are over on our YouTube channel at teachercast.net slash YouTube. guest today obtained her PhD in applied mathematics and engineering science from Northwestern University. She's also was a member of the National Security Agency for over 30 years, and she served as the first president of the NSA's Women in Mathematics Society. She's the author of two books, including Privacy Pirates

and currently she is mentoring and tutoring students from ages three through adulthood, particularly in middle school to help girls have a love for technology and STEM education. It is a pleasure to have on today, Dr. Leslie Gruest. Well, it is great to have you on the show. How are you today? I know you're down in Washington. How are things these days?

Things are good. I think we're going to have some rain. I haven't read the news today, which is just as well, so I have no idea what's going on in the capital city. And life is good.

So let's kind of take a look at where we are right now. You have the opportunity to work with so many students to support their love for STEM education. How is that going? What is that like? And talk to us a little bit about some of the things that you're working with in education these days.

Speaker 2 (02:04.918)

So I actually gave a talk earlier today on educational technology, which has some very distressing side effects in the public school environment. But I'm seeing it firsthand as a tutor for our public school system here in Montgomery County, Maryland. I get some private school students as well. I actually started off teaching, I thought it was just going to be math.

And then it was math and physics. And then it was math and physics and computer science. Oh, you're a writer. How about English? Reading and writing. So now we've got the full complement of SAT-ness going on. And then AP season came. So now I'm teaching AP stuff. And I picked up middle school kids along the way. And then even the little kids. I once had a small child, a boy.

So I'm used to what small boys do. So that didn't really rattle me. And here we are today. I love their energy. They pose unbelievable challenges sometimes. But it's so nice to see it when it finally comes together in their heads.

Well, it's certainly amazing to work with students who go from, you know, the world is at their feet to now it's in their hands and they can play with it stuff that we get a chance to do here a lot with our 11 year olds. What is it about working with students of those ages that keeps you going?

Speaker 2 (03:38.368)

I think what really keeps me going, my sweet spot has always been the middle school girls. And it's the middle school girls because that's where we lose the girls in the math and the sciences. So I just happen to know that we have a shortage of half a million cybersecurity workers in the United States alone. And so we're going to need a lot of people in math and the sciences. Cybersecurity is not just a

technical subject, right? You actually need people who are literate that can write policies and think through frameworks to work with the technical people. No big surprise, I guess it was a surprise to me, people who go to engineering school do not always have the best writing skills. And I have learned that the hard way. So.

It's good to pair up people with complementary skills in order to help. So it's sort of the full gamut for me of my girls study math and engineering and whatever, computer science. But we also work on English along the way, reading and writing skills.

Well, let's go back a little bit. You grew up in Washington and started to get interested in math at an early age. What was it about math that led you to that path?

I was just really good with numbers when I was little. I knew when I was five years old I was going to be a mathematician. And I was really lucky. I had parents who were very progressive. And so they didn't listen to other members of the family and other people in their peer group when they said, that's not a suitable career for a girl. They didn't get this. She has to be a nurse or a teacher.

Speaker 1 (05:09.665)

yeah?

Speaker 2 (05:31.832)

They didn't get that. And so they encouraged me. I actually have sort of an interesting relationship. When I went to work at the National Security Agency, where we make and break secret codes for communications, the father of the study of that field, it's called cryptology, the father of the study of that field is a guy named William Friedman. And his wife was not so shabby, Elizabeth, at this subject either.

When I was a little girl, they were my neighbors. I didn't realize it at the time because I was a little squirt, you know, five years old. And he was an elderly gentleman that lived down the block with his wife who wore a little beret and had a little mustache. And he would stop and talk to me and he'd say, what do you want to do? Would you grow up? And I said, I want to be a mathematician. And he said, well, good for you. You should be a mathematician. So in point of fact, William Friedman kind of encouraged me.

When did you realize that your neighbor William Freeman was William Freeman?

it took a while, you know, it wasn't until I was probably much older that it all kind of came together in my head. And I said, that William Friedman, that Elizabeth Friedman. And the whole reason they were living on Capitol Hill was they had retired from government service. she had chased rum runners during the twenties. he had worked for the army signal core.

But they had retired and moved into the city and they moved to Capitol Hill because there's something called the Folger Shakespeare Library there, which is a tremendous resource for Shakespeare scholars. I think they have 81st folios in their collection. And William and Elizabeth in their retirement were working on proving that William Shakespeare was actually written by Francis Bacon.

Speaker 1 (07:34.296)

So was that something that they talk to you often about?

No, no, no, no, no, because I was just little. I learned all this later and they published a book on the subject and the subject is actually still highly debated today.

Now at some point, you decided that math was going to be your career and you pursued your doctorate in it. Was there many women in the field at that time or were you kind of alone in your in your world?

So there was actually one other woman in my class in graduate school. It was a very small program. It was just starting at that point in time. So it was a pretty small program already. Interestingly enough, the other woman that was in the program, she was Polish. So she had come from Poland to study in the United States.

One of the things that I, that I adore about you is the fact that you've had a career of taking technical things and helping other people learn. mean, you, you've, you've done, you've been a teacher for all of your, all of your career here, especially on things I would imagine as far as the security and the math. Like, how did you find out that you have a knack for taking difficult things and technical things and really make helping them make sense to others who don't understand or don't live in that world?

Speaker 2 (09:03.138)

Probably learned that during middle school, actually. I remember in the ancient times, you know, when the dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was in middle school and we went to school with hot potatoes in our hands through the snow drifts, right? At that point in time, we didn't have computers, right? And so my friends would all call me. Now you think most girls just gap endlessly on the telephone.

at that age. We were actually doing our math homework together and I was teaching them all how to do their math homework. So that's when I discovered apparently I did have an ability.

That's amazing story. And just the fact that you were able to take that from your middle school years through a tremendous career. know, 30 years of supporting our, am I correct in that 30 years and supporting our national security agency? What was that like during that time? What do have any good stories that you may, what might be able to share?

Well, I mean, I think I do. I started there in 1987. I was the first woman mathematician with a PhD they had hired in a number of years. And it stayed that way for a number of years after that, which is how the whole Women in Mathematics Symposium in Society came about. But over the course of my career, I got to work at a lot of really interesting fields.

There's an old joke that says the great thing about being mathematician is you're not trained at any particular discipline. So it's kind of like you have carte blanche, right? You can go in and interfere in anybody's business. And with a little bit of extra work, you can kind of figure out how to translate what they're saying into math speak and do something with it. The rest of the joke goes, of course. The bad thing about being a mathematician is.

Speaker 2 (11:01.9)

You're not trained in any particular discipline. So wherever you go, you're kind of behind the eight ball when you start every single time. Right. But that meant that I worked with physicists. I worked with computational linguists. I worked with engineers. I worked with analysts. I worked in all sorts of areas and it was always, it kept it always very exciting. I think probably the most exciting time was during the nineties.

when the internet emerged, right? Life completely changed for all of us. It was a complete retooling of what we were doing in government. Massive reorganizations in order to think about this digital network infrastructure we were now confronting. was...

Very exciting. was a lot of stuff going on, a lot of hard thinking, a lot of blue-skying. Just a remarkable time to live through in an environment like that.

And what were your first reactions when you saw the whole technology wave happening from, you know, mainframe computers, personal computers, the internet? mean, that was when things were happening for you. What was that experience like seeing all of this technology come in, especially when you were the one that was out there trying to crunch the numbers for your team as a math as a mathematician?

Well, so I can recall as a graduate student finishing my PhD, I did have a home computer to type my dissertation on. It was pretty primitive, but it was a computer, right? So we did have that. When you moved to the National Security Agency, you know, all the stuff you've read and heard about, acres of supercomputers, was perfectly true, right? They had unbelievable resources.

Speaker 2 (13:01.566)

when I got there, many of which have been long retired now. So it was like a technologist's trip to the candy store, right? You had all sorts of resources available to you and you could do remarkable things with them once you learned how to program them and how to interact with them.

And from working in math and you know, early computing and stuff. How did that take your career into privacy?

Well, so the National Security Agency obviously makes and breaks codes. NSA gets a, well, I'd say a bad rap, but maybe some people feel differently. Things like Mr. Snowden kind of put us on the map, right? That's one of my, the usual questions I get is, how do you feel about Mr. Snowden? But.

The is, since we are more in the public eye now, people are always concerned that we're violating their civil rights. And from what I saw, we were scrupulous about following the law. I spent a lot of time with lawyers explaining to them what technology could do and getting them to say, yes, you could do that or no, you can't do that. Right. I was always checking with them.

I'm also kind of a history buff. So I had lived through the 1970s. I was still living in Washington. I was still not fully grown up yet. And I had lived through the church committee and the Pike committee hearings, right, which we all got to watch on TV another summer after Watergate, right? So I had lived through all that. I knew about that stuff.

Speaker 2 (15:00.374)

and I subsequently read the transcriptions from those meetings. It's a fascinating history of privacy abuse that was executed by our old friend J. Edgar Hoover, who unfortunately had died by the time we got around to these congressional committees. Presidents, attorney generals, kind of.

saying, yeah, we should definitely go do that. And the attorney general not necessarily signing off on it, but not stopping what happened. As for the mail opening program, the postmaster generals didn't sign off on it either, right? It was pretty sloppy in the earlier 20th century. But because of that history, we were very conscious of observing the privacy of citizens. And so we were, by the time I got there,

in late 80s, very scrupulous about what we did. And that all kind of snowballed together for me. In 1999, there was a wonderful book written by an attorney named Lawrence Lessig, who's a scholar. I think he's back at Harvard now, called Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. And he started looking at what cyberspace meant to privacy.

to nation sovereignty. He talked about the way people misbehaved in what were chat rooms or game rooms. And it kind of opened up my mind to what this new dimension of cyberspace was going to bring for us. And it wasn't all good, right? So that idea had percolated from 1999 all the way until 2017 when I retired and I said,

I think I need to finally write that book on privacy now.

Speaker 1 (16:56.482)

But we certainly are going to make sure that we have a link to that book and tell us a little bit about your journey as an author. The idea of taking complex math and creating, you know, teachable moments that way we can understand. Was there anything in there that was able to transfer over when you were actually putting pen to paper and writing your book?

Yeah, of course, because I think there's a fair number of mathematicians, I think, that really like history. I think because since we're trained in the sciences, since we're trained in the scientific method, we're very logical, right? We like to understand why. Why do things happen the way they happen? For example, I gave a talk earlier today on educational technology, and when I first got into that, I said, why?

Why is this so popular? Why have schools adopted this? Right? So we like to look for the logical. Now it turns out in intelligence analysis that things do not always appear logical. Right? One, because you don't have the whole picture. Right? You have one intercept or one letter or one side of the conversation from your opponent. And you have to kind of piece together what the rest of the story is. But that's not

The whole answer. The whole answer is people don't act very logically sometimes, right? They're irrational or passionate or angry, right? They do things unpredictably, right? And so what's fascinating to me is to take all those pieces of history and say, what really motivated somebody to do that? So to me, it was a very logical framework I started with.

But it got very messy very quickly because of human passions, human emotions, greed, power, all the usual. So I think, yes, my skills as a mathematician did transfer over very nicely into writing about privacy.

Speaker 1 (19:07.118)

You had mentioned that you retired from the NSA if I heard your correct 2017 or so. And now, of course, you know, the world has changed so many times since 2017. What are your thoughts right now on where we are with things like artificial intelligence, AI in the classroom, AI in government, AI in social media? What's your thoughts on the whole AI movement?

I did.

Speaker 2 (19:36.718)

So that is such a loaded question and we could talk for days about that. So I think the best answer I probably have for you is out there on the web. And I put a hyperlink on my LinkedIn page is the acceptance speech of Jeffrey Hinton at the Nobel Prize Awards, where he cautioned against AI as a potentially dangerous piece of technology that we should be more circumspect about.

I'm kind of with him and he's the one with the Nobel Prize. So I'm hesitant. I think it has some remarkable capabilities. It can do some remarkable things. But if you use it, you always have to do it with a grain of salt. Think about what it's doing. Think about why it's giving you an answer. It has some tremendous strengths, but there are also weaknesses.

Right? If you present it with a quandary and betray your point of view about what you would prefer to happen, it will reflect that point of view. It will tell you what you want to hear. Right? If two people come to an AI engine with a dispute, it will not be able to mediate the dispute because it could take both people's sides, in which case you're still at the contradictory point. Right? So I think

That is one big concern I have. Everybody keeps telling me about the guardrails we need for AI. I'm really tired to death of hearing about the guardrails. We went through this with cybersecurity. You probably didn't follow this, but at the UN, there were many, meetings of government experts talking about

cyber warfare and all the things that we could agree to that we wouldn't use cyber for in the warfare arena. It went absolutely nowhere. Okay, nobody's going to say, I'm not going to use it for that. Okay, it's it's different. And I think AI is kind of the same way now. And it's really scary.

Speaker 1 (21:52.566)

I couldn't agree more that, you know, being father of middle school and also teacher of middle school, we're looking at our students and they take a lot of things for granted. They're pushing buttons. They're thinking AI is a Google search when it really isn't. I'm I'd love to learn a little bit more about your work with middle school, specifically middle school girls. We've covered a similar

topics with guests with similar passions on the show before and I, you know, making sure that every student has access to the right technology has access to the right mentors has access to, you know, the the skills and the resources that they need. So that way, everybody has equal access in the reef in the in the workforce, I think is extremely important. Talk to us a little bit about the work that you get to do as a as a tutor as a teacher as a mentor.

and as a friend to so many young people.

Okay, well, let me say this about this. I love working with my middle school girls. They are some of the most challenging students you will ever encounter. Some of them are absolutely delightful human beings, and some of them are not. And hopefully that's a stage they will outgrow. But I do know the statistics tell me this is from a study that was done many years ago by the Association for Women in Mathematics.

that where girls lose interest in math and science is during the middle school years. Then no psychologist or behavioral scientist, I haven't read any report that says why, but let's just say going through puberty, adolescence, whatever causes them to get derailed. That seems to be the finding. So it's my job in life when I encounter these young ladies.

Speaker 2 (23:51.614)

to find a way to encourage them. Some of them just lose confidence, right? All I really have to be is a cheerleader, right? Tell them they can do it. Show them how to do it. If they don't get it the first time, show them again. If they still don't get it, think of another way to explain it till they get it, right? They may have very different learning styles, right? I have one student who has

the math equivalent of dyslexia, dyscalculia, right? There's a whole different technique you have to use with a student like that, right? So if I'm creative enough, if I'm inventive enough, if I'm smart enough, I can find a way to explain it that all of a sudden you'll see the light bulb go on in their heads, right? Sometimes you have to get down there and look them in the eyes and ask them point blank.

Do you really understand? Are you just telling me that so I'll go away? Right? But my goal is to make sure the light bulb goes on. And that doesn't necessarily come with just one outing, right? We may have to reinforce it over time. It doesn't just go in.

What types of programs or activities do you find are useful or supportive or what when you are working with middle school girls, what kinds of things do you find successful?

We do arts and crafts. Today I had a geometry student that was translating and rotating polygons around a plane and she just couldn't get it. So I got out a piece of graph paper and we cut out shapes and we put them on the plane and we followed the instructions about rotating and translating and all that stuff. I think those visual aids are really important. After all, that's what Montessori was all about.

Speaker 2 (25:48.236)

Right. So it works for older kids too. I have a box of 3D solids that I keep. I use it for my middle school kids. I use it for my calculus kids when we're doing volumes of rotation. Right. I'll get out a figure. I'll reach for a Kleenex box and say, OK, pretend this is a cube. What do you see? How many faces? Right. Because in a lot of cases,

that spatial intelligence hasn't been developed in those kids, right? There's some correlation in the past, I know I've read, that boys develop a better spatial intelligence than girls do. Perhaps because they play more with blocks, although I played with blocks, not dolls, right? I was weird. Or they play war, or they, know, everything becomes a gun for them, right? Boys are just different.

Okay, so I encourage the development of those other skills along the way to see if I can get a little bit more cognitive recognition of what's going on. It might be the magic bullet for this kid, right, that helps put it over the top and they say, oh, I see, okay.

Those are the best stories, right? When you're sitting there working with somebody and you just see that aha moment and then you see the smile and it all just starts to click for somebody.

It is absolutely the best.

Speaker 1 (27:18.892)

What do you think if you were able to go back in time to your backyard? What do you think that William Freeman would say knowing that you're now out there mentoring others in STEM education?

They'd say good on you, he said, and they don't owe you a thing. But what they do owe is teaching the next generation after them in the same way that you taught them. Right? And I always tell them that you don't owe me anything. This is my job. I'm your real live living mathematician, female mentor. Right? But in the future, you got to be a role model for the next generation that comes along.

That is some good advice right there. And you know, I'm thinking as you know, just having this conversation, I'm thinking of my own daughter, I'm thinking of the students who I have the chance to interact with every single day. And even for myself being a technology teacher, you see the ones that are sitting there interested, you see the ones that are out there being able to, you know, figure out these complex problems and run with it. And you see the ones that are just kind of, they're just kind of there. And how do you reach them all? How do you start to move? What do you say to other educators?

that are in your position now trying to help out their own middle school girls or their own middle school students. How do you mentor other educators?

So I don't have a lot of other opportunity to spend time with public school teachers. I do spend time with our other tutors here at the center. We have tutors with all sorts of backgrounds. So we actually have a tutor who has a background in early childhood education. So if I'm working with a little one and I say, just don't, how do I teach this? I am just not getting through. I will go to her and I'll say, what do I try now?

Speaker 2 (29:05.612)

Right now it could be a their brain isn't ready to accept this information answer. It could be, their medication has worn off or they have ADHD. You need more breaks. You need to set a timer for five minutes and do writing for five minutes and then you need to do another activity that's physical, right? So we help one another, right? And when I do encounter a teacher that's working out there, we will talk and I'll say, well, what about this?

What about this? What about this? And I'll share my stories. They share their stories. For them, for those of you that are full-time teachers out there, my hats are off to you. I don't know how you do it. I would not be able to do it myself. So I am so impressed that you could hang in there and do that day after day, year after year.

And I'm always happy to share the stories. I think I probably have life much easier than you do.

teaching is harder than working at the NSA for 30 years?

Different challenges, right? It's like the difference between a five year old boy who doesn't want to be here, a 13 year old mean girl and a high school student that's panicked because he's never read a book and now he has to learn a bunch of vocabulary for the SAT. Right? It's all different.

Speaker 1 (30:35.054)

It's a true on that one. I want to ask you one more question here as we go through. But, you know, looking ahead at where students are and looking at the challenges that are in front of them. What do you see right now is the greatest challenge to our we can start with the educational system given everything that's going on right now in the world. But you know, where do you see girls in math? Where do you see girls in STEM between now and you know, five, 10 years from now? How do we

How do we correct some of the issues that we're all right? You know, put in front of us right now and make light of

Well, so we have a finite amount of time here. So let me just say that educational technology has not been the great solution for our kids that everybody would have hoped. And we can talk more deeply about that. But when you look at the international test scores, and we're something like 28th in mathematics in the world.

To me that suggests there's a problem. I see it in my own kids when my kids come in and they don't have a math textbook for pre-calculus or calculus or physics. This is a really big problem for them because all they have to rely on are the notes from class, the packets the teachers gave them, and the homework that's been assigned.

Speaker 2 (32:12.244)

I am not saying anything negative about teachers. I know they are doing the absolute best they could. But the packets that end up getting distributed, the material that's accessible to these kids is nowhere good as having a good, solid textbook. Right? For my physics kids that come in that are confused, I reach for my copy of my favorite physics textbook, open it to the chapter they're at, and say, start reading.

Right. And most of these kids are 11th and 12th graders. Right. They're to go to college soon. They need to learn how to learn on their own. Right. I'm encouraging them to be self-sufficient. Now if they're stuck I'll help them. Right. I don't abandon them. But to have a beautiful sixth edition or 13th edition physics book that's clean that has great illustrations that doesn't have any errata.

that has great problems in it, that's like gold for these kids and they don't have it. And as for, well, maybe we could offer those textbooks online, that would be only a partial solution because what the research is saying is that when you read something in hard copy, you read it more deeply. When you read it online, you read it superficially, right?

So they are not going to derive the same benefit from an online textbook that they are going to derive from a physical textbook. There is a reason textbooks developed, right? There is reason that this physics book is now in its 13th edition, right? It's a great book. It explains complicated subjects simply, right? And there is no substitute. I could go on.

online experiments for science class. I mean, that is just a travesty, right? The scientific method is trying things out in a real lab to see what happens, right? It's like the learning skills of little kids, right? They learn to crawl, they learn to stand, they learn to cruise, they learn to walk. How do they do that? By trying to do it, right? The babysitting in the high chair.

Speaker 2 (34:33.098)

learns that yes indeed that bowl of cereal will fall to the floor and make a huge mess and guess what mom will pick it up and let's try it again and see if the same thing happens and then mom gets mad eventually and we try not to do it anymore and the baby giggles right that's how we learn that's how mammals learn right so you can't do online experiments and expect kids to absorb the same lessons

from them. Does that answer your question?

It does. And it gives me so many things to think about as I go through the next couple of days in my class. And, you know, it when you are the one in class teaching the computer topics, my philosophy is physical has to come before digital, right? I want my kids trying things. I want them to put their hands on paper. I want them to, to draw things and then we can figure out what it looks like in the, in the virtual world. Right. But I

completely agree with your philosophy on this and your philosophy on working with people. And I love how, you know, this isn't it's difficult, right? Teaching is difficult. But when I think when we're having fun with it, I don't think it's as difficult as it needs to be. And, you know, Dr. Cruz, I want to say thank you so much for spending your time. As you mentioned, there's, you know, we're kind of finite on our time today, I would love to invite you back on it to have a follow up with this.

That would be true.

Speaker 1 (36:06.51)

terrific. We can certainly get into so many. mean, I'm just sitting here taking notes and writing out, you know, part two and part three of this podcast episode, because there's so many things that I want to ask you about from your time in Washington to working with students to just just mentoring, mentoring adults, as I know you've done for many, many years. So please take this as a as a invite to come back on anytime. Would love to have you would love to talk about your journey as an author also.

But where can somebody reach out and get more information about the great work that you're doing and how can they get in contact with you?

So I do have an old web page that will come up if you if you search I'm working on a new web page. So it will be newer and spiffier. I am on LinkedIn. So you can search me up on LinkedIn. I'm posting pretty regularly several times a week and I'm talking about all these subjects. I'm talking a lot about education. I'm talking a lot about privacy. I'm talking about AI as well out there.

I've been thinking about starting a sub stack, but I'm not quite there yet, but it's a tempting thought. And I, of course, have two books already. The first book, which was privacy past, present and future, very academic, 340 pages. Most people won't read it. But the second book was intended to be the trade book version of that. A hundred pithy pages on everything you need to know about privacy. Bottom line message for

Both those books is privacy is essential to democracy. That's why we have these individual rights to curb the power of government. So you can find those on Amazon.

Speaker 1 (37:56.076)

We will certainly make sure that we have the links to both of those books, your LinkedIn, and maybe even your sub stack. Okay. Find out more information over on teachercast.net slash podcast. Dr. Leslie Groos. Thank you so much. This has been a pleasure and a most enjoyable evening. I thank you so much for coming on today.

Thank you, Jeff. Delighted to do so. Look forward to coming back.

We want to say one more time thank you to Dr. Groose for coming on the show today. What an honor to have her on. I hope you guys enjoyed this. And if this is the first time you're checking out our episode, head on over to teachercast.net slash podcast.

And you can check out all the episodes of Digital Learning Today, the Jeff Bradbury show, Ask the Tech Coach, and your favorite shows. We're of course available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and the video for this and all of our shows can be found over at teachercast.net slash YouTube. Don't forget to hit that like and subscribe. And that wraps up this episode of Digital Learning Today on behalf of Dr. Cruz and everybody here on TeacherCast. My name is Jeff Bradbury, reminding you guys to keep up the great work in your classrooms and continue sharing your passions with your students.