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Winnie Wrote a Math Book
SoyChemist writes "Hollywood is not known for providing a wealth of positive female role models. Danica McKellar, the actress that played Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years and Elsie Snuffin on The West Wing, has written a math book for teenage girls. 'Math Doesn't Suck' is done in the style of a teen magazine. It even includes a horoscope, cute doodles of shoes and jewelry, and testimonials from attractive young career women that use math at work. It focuses on fractions and pre-algebra and uses mnemonics like calling a reciprocal a 'refliprocal', because you just take the fraction and flip it upside down. Wired interviewed McKellar about the new book and her crusade to eliminate the achievement gap between boys and girls in math courses. McKellar graduated Summa Cum Laude from UCLA. While studying there, she co-authored a proof and presented it at a conference. After she and Mayim Bialik — star of Blossom and a PhD in neuroscience — appeared in a 20/20 episode about intellectual actresses, several literary agents came knocking on her door."
When I graduated high school, the top ten students that year were girls. That was true at 3 other high school graduations I went to that year. When I graduated college, the valedictorian and salutatorian were female. I don't believe these were rare cases. So what's this "gap" they talk about? Seems to me the guys are falling behind.
It's a funny post, but it also illustrates one of the core problems with recruiting girls into math and engineering: a lot of them aren't interested. My sisters don't care about getting into a really intensive job because they know that they're going to get married and become homemakers. It's not that there's a problem if they do differently, it's that they've chosen that path to happiness. How many girls like my sisters are skewing the results of math/engineering studies?
Developmental scientists have named the behavioral manifestation of this competence object permanence.
Convergent evidence indicates that frontal lobe maturation plays a critical role in the display of
object permanence, but methodological and ethical constrains have made it difficult to collect neurophysiological
evidence from awake, behaving infants. Near-infrared spectroscopy provides a noninvasive assessment
of changes in oxy- and deoxyhemoglobin and total hemoglobin concentration within a prescribed
region. The evidence described in this report reveals that the emergence of object permanence is related to
an increase in hemoglobin concentration in frontal cortex. Also, a few choice Natalie Portman quotes:
* "I loved school so much that most of my classmates considered me a dork."
* "Smart women love smart men more than smart men love smart women."
* "I'm going to college. I don't care if it ruins my career. I'd rather be smart than a movie star. "
I haven't read it, but I think the fundamental premise of the book is sound. One of my little cousins is a bit too advanced for this now, but she's one of the smartest kids I've ever met and also one of the girliest. More role models that demonstrate that the two don't have to be mutually exclusive can only be positive. Kids are more likely to take their cues from celebrities than high school teachers with the media saturation we have these days. It's the attitude that there is a necessary gulf between academics and football, academics and celebrity, or academics and being "girly" that hurts the most. In my high school we had a state championship football team, and the captain was also a lead band member and a good student. It doesn't have to be football players versus nerds... and in fact the way our society is going it might be better to encourage everyone to participate in sports more.
As far as hooking people a little more substantively, I think she hit it on the head in the interview when she mentioned that one of the fascinations that drew her into mathematics was the infinitely large and the infinitely small. I've started off a ton of lengthy conversations introducing basic set theory and stuff to non-mathematicians just by challenging them on things like what is infinity, how do we define infinity, how do we add infinity to other numbers, matching up cardinalities with the natural numbers... The Monty Hall problem is a great one for thinking about probabilities. Kids get fascinated by imaginary numbers just because it's the first "weird" thing everyone emphasizes, so it's easy to get them playing around with some algebra like that. A high schooler taking their first "proofs" geometry can enjoy doing some non-Euclidean stuff, up to the big reveal when you tell them they're working on the surface of a sphere or whatever hehe.
I was watching the Daily Show the other day when they interviewed the astrophysicist hosting Nova, and the guy had an infectious enthusiasm (to lift Jon Stewart's language directly hehe). If you've ever watched the Feynman lectures, it's the same sort of thing, at least for me. The more people out there from all walks of life enthusiastically promoting the accessible parts of math and science, the better.
A friend of mine from Belgium was telling me that's how they do it over there. In a single high school you'll find about the same proportion of students who are athletes as in a school in the U.S., but they represent lots of different local (competing) teams.
Apparently, it goes a long way towards preventing formations of mob mentalities and everything that goes with it.
So e.g., there's no such thing as a school pep rally in support of one sports team and they don't even have anything like the divide between "jocks" and "nerds" (or at least, not to the extent seen in schools in the U.S.).
I don't see it happening in the U.S. anytime soon, but who knows? It could start small, in a place with semi-rational school administrators trying to free up budgets, for example. With the promise of tax reductions, many things can gain political support. (:
I was with you until you started on your sterotyping rant. Preppies aren't the kids that were doing well; they were the ones who had well off parents and never had to work. Kinda like the Paris Hilton you seem to hate.
It's almost degrading to women that people keep bringing this stuff up. Condescending might be the right word.
No, what's condescending is including horoscopes and cute doodles of shoes and jewelry. WTF!?
Like when someone feels the need to comment about how well Colin Powell speaks. There's an unspoken 'and he's black' that is left hanging for the listener to fill in by themselves.
No, the unspoken thing is "in stark contrast to the president". His race has nothing to do with it. When your Commander-in-Thief speaks like a semi-retarded gibbon, it makes everybody who can pronounce "nuclear" appear as eloquent as a poet.
Like when someone feels the need to comment about how well Colin Powell speaks. There's an unspoken 'and he's black' that is left hanging for the listener to fill in by themselves.
It's funny how people choose which races to recognize and which ones not. You could've replaced the unspoken with 'and he's Scottish', which is an equally valid statement. But you didn't, and why it seems obvious that you didn't is the heart of the issue.
There's nothing wrong with marketing towards certain kinds of women though. There's been plenty of math and philosophy courses filled with sport metaphors to market to jocks. Why not one build one around fashion? Anything that gets people learning is good, whether or not I'd personally appreciate it.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
It's incredibly frustrating to have my peers think less of me when they find out that I don't actually want to have a career; I want to have some sort of part-time job to help out financially and mainly take care of the house and kids.
People don't think less of you by nearly as much as they would think less of a man who wanted that.
Wrong. You're forgetting about the possibility about male homemakers, which is really the uncovered area in feminism.
The problem with feminists' position on homemaking is that a lot of the bigger, more radically outspoken feminists are more supremacists than gender egalitarians. They ignore the stigma placed on the male if the male isn't a patriarch, or an alpha, or a "provider". If I didn't have a college degree or a job that paid well enough to support a wife and kids, I'd have zero social capitol, and *that* is a key problem in approaching a society that treats genders equally.
A man who makes home is almost unheard of and certainly not respected among a great deal of the people I know, and I think that's a shame- a god damn shame. I would even go so far as to call male homemaking a litmus test for the amount of progress we've made on gender equality. Putting women in positions of power is one thing (implying that women can "stray" from their "place under men"), but allowing a man to "lower" himself to homemaking or even the perception that a homemaker is "under" a worker/provider is the true determinant of equality of sex.
+5, Truth
Yes mathematics gives you a headache. Frequently you don't get it. Frequently you must spend weeks on a topic before getting it. Often it may elude you for years. Then you finally get it, and usually hard work and effort has absolutely nothing to do with that.
The sad fact is, people think mathematics is hard because most mathematicians are lousy at explaining it. It's not explained properly and as a result people struggle with it until they finally come across a resource or idea or epiphany that allows them to realize the in retrospect blindingly obvious idea that lay behind the whole topic. What to know why it seems so "elegant" and obvious in retrospect. It's because it is obvious, as long as you were taught it correctly.
Best example I can think of offhand is determinants? Remember those? I'll bet there's a lot of people here who went through the whole spiel with them over and over and all the while didn't have a clue what they were all about. Let me tell you what they are, or quote a better man than I on the subject. "The determinant of a matrix is an (oriented) volume of the parallelepiped whose edges are its columns." You see, that's what a determinant actually is, but most student are never taught that most essential fact. Once you get that, the rest is all just formulae around it. But most are just taught the formulae. Most of mathematics is taught like this. Form without essence. It's a tradgedy. The greater tragedy is people think all this incompetence is a result of mathematics being "hard". It's just hard to teach, not to learn.
Here's a link to a much longer rant which shows just how big a problem the teaching of mathematics has become in some quarters.
May the Maths Be with you!