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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.
...that a book aimed at increasing numeracy has horoscopes? What next? Feng Shui in geography texts?
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.
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.
You're looking at this backward. Girls are told they're supposed to aspire to beauty above all else. The idea here is to show them that you can have that without giving up intelligence.
A single voice isn't going to tell girls that they shouldn't want to be pretty. One well-spoken voice might convince a few that they can be pretty and smart.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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. "
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"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.
Zero, but thats the answer any night.
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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.
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?
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