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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."
Back in 1994, Barbie thought differently.
Math is hard!
But the judge says I'm not allowed within 100 feet of her.
"If the man of the house gets home from work at 5:30 and dinner takes 1.25 hours to prepare, at what time should you start making it?"
"If your makeup costs $40 and you put it on once a day, how much does it cost per application if the makeup runs out after 70 days?"
"If the cake recipe calls for the oven to be at 400 degree fahrenheit but the oven only has celsius....
Trolling is a art,
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I don't think one book, even if it looks like the rest of the teen girl trash rags, is going to overcome a decades of social pressure to avoid being seen as "nerdy." What we really need is to have high schools that don't go out of their way to reinforce the perception that going to state for ****ball is the pinnacle of achievement.
The Schwartz space ain't from Spaceballs.
If it ain't 90% Greek then it isn't a math book.
Actually this is a good idea the problem is that today there are reports that boys are trailing girls academically. Part of the reason is if they make an All girls school or make programs that are designed to help girls they do so sometimes at the expense of the education of the boys. But if such programs or All boy public schools are made then there is a community cry. Boys and Girls think differently, they need to be taught differently.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
There's a hot female geek
Rock-paper-scissors will have to decide this, guys.
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
...that a book aimed at increasing numeracy has horoscopes? What next? Feng Shui in geography texts?
What? Plenty of good models out there...
And if just talking about looks and all, showing fit and lean, non-obese women is a good thing. We've got a horrible obesity problem out there, so, some skinnier role models are a good thing IMHO.
So, we now have 'thinkers' to combine with the 'lookers'...and pretty soon, we'll have perfect women if they follow their role models.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
This tread is worthless without pics... of hot, math using girls. /whaddaya mean, wrong website?
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
My first impression of the book review was - "Oh gawd, a math book went 'OMG Ponies !!111'".
But I've sort of realized that form follows emotion and in a world where Math is not consider cool (not in India though), something like this which stands away from the boring beige world of mathematics would get more eyeballs into the basic subject. Not that I'd consider some of it boring, by any stretch of imagination. And who hasn't rewritten math problems into "real" problems ? (xkcd has become lame of late - I suspect after his visit to MIT).
But such wedges into the insular cracks of things could be nice - to let people burn through the "Thou Suckest" phase of learning anything new. Especially when the field is full of elitist fifty year olds ("elite" is good, "elitist" is bad).
So if it makes a bunch of girls pick up math, good - just the same way Asterix&Obelix makes me want to learn French ... we all just need a reason, to make whatever we're doing cool (ah, the tyranny of cool).
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
So what, the ugly ones don't use math?
I'd also generalize HER polylogarithm!
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.
> Her singing of its repetitive and insanely peppy themesong is driving my out of my mind, though.
Clearly so, but it could be worse: "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" is illustrative of subtraction, but somewhat tedious if one is not an actual red-eyed participant.
"And if just talking about looks and all, showing fit and lean, non-obese women is a good thing. We've got a horrible obesity problem out there, so, some skinnier role models are a good thing IMHO"
It's not a binary proposition. There is a huge range between obese (bad), and what actresses and models look like (also bad).
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
stupid. showing overly skinny women is SO healthy for the psyche of young girls. let's make sure our math teachers have all posed for stuff magazine first...
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. "
If 10% of all Slashdot accounts are current, and 25% of all posts relating to women in math and science are derogatory, what percentage of people that post to slashdot are going to get laid tonight?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Every time any adult tries to be cool in order to get kids to pay attention to a subject in school that they hate, they fail miserably. This is not (only) because adults simply aren't cool, but because the ploy is blazingly obvious. The funny thing about teenagers, is that they are the way they are in no small part because they've grown intellectually to the point where they can recognize lies and propaganda. This sort of thing only reinforces the idea that adults are clueless and generally to be ignored. See also: public service announcements by MC Hammer or Flava Flave.
I'd have to admit though, that she does have one important ingredient in the textbook. That she demonstrates that you can be simultaneously pretty and intellectual (and includes other examples). If she could lose the cheesy teen-mag look, I'm sure we'd see some progress.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"If your ex-husband, who was earning $45k per year, looses his job but now collects 30% of that in unemployment, and your alimony was calculated at 67% of his net salary while employed, what differential (minus child-support) must now be applied in order that he may loose his other testical?"
Tara Smith, a Professor of Epidemiology, and author of the science blog Aetiology (which I like) reviewed the book here , and has a short interview with Danica.
The concern is that some segments of the American population (women and some ethnic groups) might be discouraged from doing math. I've seen this first-hand. Several years ago, I spent a year working in high school math classes as part of an NSF graduate teaching fellowship, and I saw that remedial classes had a disproportionate number of black students. The troubling part was that many of these students were capable of much more, and really didn't belong in remedial classes. Now, I have no idea why this was the case; it could be part "institutionalized racism", it could be due to socioeconomic factors, or it could have been something else entirely. But on more than one occasion, I had students make comments along the lines of: "we're black; we don't do math." Seriously. Now, maybe these students were just trying to get out of doing their homework, but I got the impression that they really saw academic achievement (particularly in math) as a "white thing."
I'm not one to advocate diversity in an academic field solely for the sake of diversity. Math doesn't depend on the race or gender of the mathematician. However, if there are students who are being discouraged from studying math in some way or another because of their gender, or race, or socioeconomic status, then that troubles me greatly, and it's something that we should work to change.
On the Ninth Day, G-d created Baseball. well. I guess thats proof against intelligent design.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
lets create a dumbed down, silly math book with purposely misspelled words just so we can appeal to little girls.
How insulting to girls.
Lets make a similar math book for all the boys who aren't interested in math. It should feature GI Joe's using math to kill each other, aliens, and anything gross or violent. For the older boys lets throw in some soft core porn to get their eyes on the page (males are after all more visual, right?).
Come on! This is rediculous. While I applaud her good intentions, I have to wonder why such a thing was not necessary for girls like her to be interested in math? I am all for making learning fun, and math books are about as dull and boring as it gets, but I see no reason why it has to be dumbed down and made gender specific.
My 9 year old girl is great at math, without this.
There are better ways to get kids to learn. Or, rather, to not turn them off to learning, since they start off wanting to learn and then we destroy that desire later on.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
For pete's sake, people, since when have mnemonics become the work of the dumbing-down devil? No, you can't learn all of math that way, but when it comes to remember the definition of one term it's fine. I still use SOHCAHTOA, I must be an idiot.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Anyone taking honours-level mathematics will author thousands of proofs before they graduate.
... "author". As in writing it up and getting it published, in a peer reviewed academic journal. See here, published in Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and General.
By "author" they mean
Who is the target audience for this book? Kids who are already into math will be embarrassed/disgusted with the teen mag layout, and kids who aren't won't read a math book even if their parents buy it for them and say "look, this actress you may have seen on Nick at Nite wrote a math book!" I think just about anyone would wince at the "breaking a nail" cliche in the title, although I suspect Ms. McKellar's not to blame.
Many of these kinds of efforts look like they were produced by someone who is more concerned with being on record with supporting women going into science and math than actually having a real effect. That's why we end up with textbooks crammed with mini-biographies of Sophie Germain and Ada Lovelace that nobody will actually read and that anyone with enough brainpower to do basic algebra will recognize as tacit admissions that a woman mathematician is an odd duck indeed.
McKellar looks like her heart is in the right place - she's presumably wealthy and is a professional actress, and yet she still devoted serious time and energy to studying math. Presumably she wants others to share her enthusiasm for an interesting and potentially lucrative field of endeavor. But I very much doubt that she was "turned on" to math by a book like this. I imagine that her supportive family and the confidence boost that came from being a TV star helped overcome the anti-math stigma.
Of course, as much as the stereotypical mathematician is not feminine, he's not particularly masculine either, not an effeminate man precisely, probably more of a modern-day eunuch. Certainly no young men go into mathematics to impress their peers, so I think a more important question would be why young women are more influenced by "peer pressure" than young men.
Is it low self-esteem? Women think they can't get ahead except by being "cheerleader" types? Or high self-esteem? Women think they *can* become cheerleader types if they wear uncomfortable enough clothing and enough makeup, while nerdy guys figure they couldn't make the football team in a million years?
Ignoring the usual trolls here, McKellar did adopt a tabloid-style format that much of the /. crowd would usually deride. Therefore, I guess I shouldn't be surprised by much of the relevant discussion.
But, from what I understand, that's the best approach since the target audience has been fed this format for a number of decades. Actually, I anticipate that mothers will buy it (for their kids) and even flip through it themselves given the probably that they will appreciate the similarity.
And quit whining about the appearance of horoscopes. If horoscopes appear in teen magazine, and you're trying to adhere to the teen magazine format, then something that resembles a horoscope had better be included. In fact, if it was done well, the audience may remember the math the next time they see a similar horoscope (analogy: count the number of Simpson's parodies do you notice on a daily basis).
I applaud the goal and concept but the hardest (and most crucial) part is having the content itself read like a teen magazine. I have no idea how to make that happen, but I'm not the one attempting this. Hopefully McKellar has that talent. Good luck.
This is not my sig
..... how much double standards have come to dominate our discourse.
Let me elaborate.
Imagine for a minute if a successful male role model had written a book explicitly for boys, in the tradition of the classical textbooks on engineering/science/mathematics, and emphasised rigour, and used examples exclusively applicable to males, using language which boys would be comfortable with (but girls would probably not). Imagine he used the default (i.e., masculine) pronoun throughout, so as to make it easier for boys to identify with any example given. Imagine that he completely ignored all the usual PC-language nonsense which the "progressive" crowd in educational circles is so fond of nowadays, and used a no-bullshit, call-a-spade-a-spade approach which boys can usually instantly grok, and are more comfortable with. Further, he would have tried to make mathematics more "manly" by making short work of the idea that boys who like mathematics are "nerds" or other social outcasts, and by identifying it with masculinity throughout the ages. Imagine he tried to bring out the kick-ass-ness of many male mathematicians throughout history, while implicitly linking their masculinity with both their mathematics and their kick-ass-ness - showing it as a complementary triad.
Now imagine that this book had succeeded - imagine it managed to convince a large number of boys to actually learn and like mathematics, and also proved to be something which sparked off a mini-revolution in schools across the country (extremely unlikely, I know, but please bear with me for a moment). Imagine it set off a pro-mathematics trend, or managed to correct the more pernicious effects of the anti-rigour and in general anti-intellectual atmosphere found in many schools today, with special reference to the subjects of mathematics and science.
What would have been the reaction?
Most probably, irrespective of the merits of the book itself, and the work it may have done it get a large number of boys interested in mathematics, it would have been denounced as social commentators, feminists, assorted people from the left, maybe a few from the right, and educationists, as discriminatory, sexist, and insensitive, with probably the "racist" epithet hurled in for good measure.
However, when a feminine role model does it, this thought does not even occur to us. We take it for granted that special books by females for females are, in some mysterious and unquestionable fashion, immune to criticisms which would be levelled against any male who did the corresponding thing for his gender.
This is not to suggest that we should criticise this author. To the contrary, in fact - she has taken efforts to rectify what she sees as a larger cultural problem. She must be applauded for that.
However, the point is that, the same way we applaud her, we must also applaud the hypothetical male author outlined above, for both are working towards a noble goal - that of education - in the way they think they can contribute the most. That is more than can be said for the vast majority.
By ignoring the differences between the genders, we do society and the individuals in it, through the medium of our education policies, a great disservice. By non-judgementally accepting the differences, and optimising our education systems to take them into account, with differently structured books for girls and boys in junior and middle school is the need is felt for such, we can improve education for everyone, instead of making attempts to forcefully fit it into out pet ideological framework.
Denying the reality of the differences between the genders because it does not fit in with our political worldview is, IMHO, as irrational as denying that some scientific fact because it does not fit in with our religious worldview.
More generally, while speaking of mathematics, it is my opinion that teaching it in a rigorous but intuitive manner is an absolute
But why do they make those life choices? When you walk into a room and you're the only girl and the rest are hormonal boys making stupid jokes, are you going to go back? I did, but that's because I've been a geek all my life but I have plenty of friends that did not. And if you notice, this book is targeting middle school girls. That the time where girls choose, in a real sense, whether to care about math. So, she wrote the book in a style for middle school girls and if they make it out of puberty with a little more math knowledge, they might make different choices. A great example of a more nuanced look at this (for older girls in computer science) is MIT's report on women enrolled in the EECS department from over 10 years ago: http://www.eecs.mit.edu/AY94-95/announcements/13.h tml
The sad part is that a lot of the material in here is still true.
Alright, no one is to flame anyone until I blow this whistle. Even... and I want to make this absolutely clear... even if they do type "God"
What do you mean on the Ninth Day? Haven't you ever read Genesis, the rest of the creation story takes place "In the Big Inning".....cue the groans.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The best math always is. It's hard, gives you a headache, you lose sleep trying to figure it out. But once you do you are astonished at how elegant it is and how it all fits together so beautifully. And it doesn't matter in the slightest what anatomy you have between your legs, or what your 23rd chromosome pair looks like.
I object to the word "mathematics" being debased to elementary-school arithmetic. But that's another matter.
...laura