[MUSIC]
Alright, good morning everybody,
and welcome to today's story time.
My name is teacher Bia — I'm one
of the teachers at The Lawrence —
and today I'm going to be reading
the story of the brilliant Alexa Canady.
This week, we are continuing with our
event celebrating Black voices in STEAM,
and we're telling stories of different Black scientists
and engineers and innovators and mathematicians,
stories that are very actively
ignored or erased from our history.
In addition to that, we put together a resource
list that can be found in the description below,
where you can find resources like children's books,
both about different Black scientists but
also discussing race and how to be anti-racist.
We also have a list of
Black-owned bookstores that you can support,
as well as some other resources
like articles and websites and podcasts
to help folks have conversations about race.
Also before we get started, I want to
invite you to subscribe to our channel,
give this video a like if you
want to see more storytimes.
But we also have other different kinds of
science videos you can explore in our channel as well.
So let's go ahead and get started with today's story!
Alright, here we are.
Today we are learning about the
story of the brilliant Alexa Canady —
that's who you can see here in this picture.
Alexa Canady is a medical doctor.
We're going to find out a little more about
how she grew up and what kind of doctor she is,
and what makes her so special
as a doctor amongst her other peers.
Alright, so Alexa Irene Canady
was born in Lansing, Michigan
where she grew up with her parents and her brother.
They grew up, actually, just outside of Lansing,
and Canady and her brother were the
only two Black students in their entire school,
and faced some prejudice from
their teachers and their peers as well.
And maybe you can try to imagine
— or maybe you've experienced this —
what it's like to grow up when
you're different from everyone around you,
and because of that,
people also treat you differently.
One of the stories that I learned about Alexa
is that, when she was young, one
of her teachers, actually for a while,
would switch her test scores with the
lower test scores of another white student
in order to cover her intelligence.
The teacher didn't want people to
know that Alexa was so intelligent.
But despite that, their parents were very
supportive and encouraging of their success.
Her parents really taught them about the
importance of getting an education;
they really valued getting an education,
and they really wanted to
support their kids in doing that.
And Canady was incredibly intelligent,
and she was nominated as a National Achievement Scholar in 1967 when she was still in high school.
After high school, she went on to attend
the University of Michigan and study zoology.
Zoology is the study of animals.
And during her time
there, she faced many obstacles
and she even got close to
dropping out due to a crisis of confidence.
Maybe at a point in Alexa's path during college,
after hearing so much from people
around her that she did not deserve to be there,
sometimes these things
start getting to you, right?
And at some point, she had a crisis of
confidence — she felt like she wasn't deserving,
that she wasn't good enough
to stay in school where she was.
But she learned about a
scholarship for minorities in medicine
and she decided to apply,
and she ended up not dropping out,
which we should be very thankful for
because she went on to become an incredible doctor.
She then went on to receive a medical degree from the University of Michigan Medical School,
and she fell in love with neurology.
Neurology, as you might have guessed
from this picture on the slide over here,
is the study of brains, and you can
imagine our brains are super complex
and they help us speak and sense
the world around us, and make and think.
So it's a very hard field to be
part of as a medical professional.
But she fell in love with neurology
during her first years in medical school
and she decided to pursue a
career in something called neurosurgery.
Neurosurgeons are
doctors that operate on the brain
so they actually open up your head
and can fix things inside of our brains.
So you can imagine that that's something
you have to be very skilled and very precise
in order to accomplish.
And that's the path that she
decided to pursue for herself.
At that time, there weren't any
women or any Black people in that field,
in the field of neurosurgery,
and Canady's adviser
recommended that she choose another specialty,
but she decided to face it head-on and she
worked really hard to become a competitive candidate.
She would read lots of
articles, go to lots of conferences,
and always tried to stay on top
of the latest knowledge in the field.
Then she went on to do her
internship, which is part of her medical training,
at the Yale New Haven Hospital,
and she became the first Black woman
to be a neurosurgery resident in the
United States, at the University of Minnesota.
Dr. Canady ended up
specializing in pediatric neurosurgery,
and you at home might know what that means, right?
So a pediatrician is a
doctor that takes care of children.
And Dr. Canady is a very specific doctor
for kids: She's a pediatric neurosurgeon,
so she helps fixing kids' brains using surgery.
She is known for being a patient-focused surgeon
and shows a lot of care for her patients.
And that is really one of the
things that makes Dr. Canady stand out.
Her ability to connect and communicate
with patients and provide attentive care
really makes her stand out as a physician.
She really believes in the
importance of connecting and talking
and getting to know her patients,
and that's not true for a lot of doctors.
A lot of doctors don't have
as much contact with their patients,
but Dr. Canady tries a patient-first approach.
She always puts the patient first and she
is known to be very close with her patients.
She's known to even play some video
games with some of her patients sometimes.
After becoming a pediatric neurosurgeon,
Dr. Canady advanced through her career,
and she became the chief of
neurosurgery at the Children's Hospital of Michigan
from 1987 until 2001, before she moved to Florida.
In that, she also did a lot of research.
After she moved, she kept
working as a neurosurgeon for a few years
before retiring at a different hospital as well.
But she had an incredible career that
made a tremendous impact in her field.
She contributed to a lot of very innovative research,
and she also really advocated
for doctors to really make connections
and care for their
patients while they're treating them,
which I think is very amazing.
So I want to end today's story
by leaving you a quote by Dr. Canady
and maybe discussing that a little bit.
One of her quotes says:
"The greatest challenge I
faced in becoming a neurosurgeon
was believing it was possible."
You might remember
when we were reading her story,
during her time in college, she got very close
to dropping out due to a crisis of confidence,
and, once again, when she
decided to pursue a career in neurosurgery,
her advisors actually advised her against it, saying
no Black woman has ever gone into that field.
So maybe it was hard for her to
imagine and believe that it was possible
for her to achieve what she was
trying to set her mind into achieving.
But luckily, she went through with it
and she persevered despite the
adversity that she might have faced
because I guarantee you that a
lot of people also did not believe
that it was possible for Dr. Alexa
Canady to become a neurosurgeon.
And yet she went ahead and proved them wrong
by not only becoming a great
neurosurgeon, but being an outstanding doctor
that really cares for her patients and is
really an example of what good medical care is.
Alright everybody, thank you so
much for joining me for today's story
where we learned about Dr. Alexa Canady.
We'll be reading more stories about
Black scientists throughout this week,
both on Wednesday and Friday as well.
I want to remind everyone and
encourage you to use our resource list below
with books and other resources geared
toward helping folks have discussions
about race and how to actively be anti-racist.
I also invite you to subscribe to our channel
if you want to see more science videos like this one.
Make sure to subscribe and give this video a like.
But nonetheless, thank you so much
for joining me for today's storytime —
I really appreciate it!
Once again, my name is teacher Bia,
and I will see you next time
here, at The Lawrence at Home.
Bye-bye, friends!
