Winnie Wrote a Math Book 638
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."
Gap? What gap? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Random bits from the book... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Am I the only one peeved... (Score:3, Interesting)
Or perhaps it was just a stupid decision.
Re:fp (Score:2, Interesting)
Natalie Portman's neuroscience paper (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
* "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. "
Re:what's the point (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Nice try, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Nice try, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
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. (:
Re:Nice try, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Barbie disagrees (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Random bits from the book... (Score:3, Interesting)
If _everything_ has more internal energy, that leads to several quandaries:
i) What's important in energy transfer of any type, but especially with degraded energy types like heat, is an energy *difference* between the hot and cold regions. If you've added a fixed amount of energy to every object, then the transfer rate would still be the same as before, leading to no change. (However, see pt. ii, below). This assumes something like Newton's law of heating and cooling (or just dE/dt = k1(E2-E1), where k1 is roughly constant at a given energy).
If the energy was bumped up by an amount proportional to the energy already in the object, then the 25 degree difference mentioned by the parent makes some sense, because hotter (more energetic) objects would lose/absorb heat even faster to/from their surroundings (dE/dt = a*k1*(E2 - E1). Here, a>1, and was just factored out of the 'original' energies E1 and E2 mentioned above).
ii) More energy really does lead to more gravitational attraction due to E = mc^2. This would be absolutely negilible at our scales, but it would tend to make black holes more sucky, and might change galactic dynamics on long time scales.
iii) Most interesting to me is the fact that the Third Law of Thermodynamics defines a perfect crystal as having _no_ entropy at zero Kelvins (neglecting quantum effects like zero-point energy). Bumping up the energy of everything including this hypothetical crystal would lead to a breakdown of the temperature scale just above zero Kelvins. That might happen if everything except some hypothetical crystal were to have energy somehow magically added to it.
I dunno. Time to go clean more floors.
STOP SPOUTING MYTHS! (Score:1, Interesting)
First off no one but feminist interest groups really stress this gap thing and others who follow their well created myths. What about the important gap of women vs. men in Major League Basebell where no women is represented? Women and men do not have to compete in everything. You do not hear much hype about a male gender gap in nursing, teaching elementary school, etc. because there are no male groups to whine and moan about non-issues but there are feminists and fake women studies courses in universities.
http://www.uaf.edu/northern/schools/myth.html [uaf.edu]
"But the idea that the "schools shortchange girls" is wrong and dangerously wrong. It is girls who get higher grades in school, who do better than boys on standardized tests of reading and writing, and who get higher class rank and more school honors. It is young women who enter and graduate from college far more frequently than young men. It is women who have made dramatic progress in obtaining professional, business, and doctoral degrees. The great gender gap of the 1960s in advanced degrees has almost closed, especially in the professional fields to which ambitious women aspire. In the view of elementary and high school students, the young people who sit in the classroom year after year and observe what is going on, both boys and girls agree: Schools favor girls. Teacher think girls are smarter, like being around them more, and hold higher expectations for them."
"The American Association of University Women (AAUW) put itself on the political map through its highly publicized 1992 report: How Schools Shortchange Girls. The media trumpeted the message around the world: In the schools, as in so many other areas of life, females are victims. Girls are silenced in the classroom, suffer a decline in self-esteem at adolescence, and fall far behind boys in such crucial subjects as science and mathematics. As the AAUW Executive Summary declares:"
"Neither girls nor boys nor the nation itself are served by politicized research and "noble lies." Major assertions in the AAUW report are based on research by David and Myra Sadker that has mysteriously disappeared. Evidence which contradicts their thesis that the schools shortchange girls is buried in supplemental tables obtainable only at great difficulty and expense. Such shady practices undermine public confidence in social science research. This damage done by the AAUW report will have repercussions that last far beyond the immediate issue of whether either girls or boys are shortchanged in the school."
Re:Barbie disagrees (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [scotsman.com]. 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.
Re:Barbie disagrees (Score:3, Interesting)
The point I think that was trying to be conveyed was a suggestion. How about this: how about we judge a person on the person and not the lineage from which they descend? How about we judge a person on the person and not the gender to which they belong?
Next thing you know they'll be targeting educational materials to fat people by using less word problems involving apples and more word problems involving Baconators.
Re:Gap? What gap? (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's see. This was a while ago, but of the top ten in my graduating class, two were male. They both had science and math majors. Of the eight women, only four of us did. Both of the guys have gone on into science and math heavy fields (MD and engineer). Of the women, only two did (veterinarian and dentist). So there is a gap in achievement when you look at that for math and science.
Why do I think that is? Well, I graduated high school with majors in math, science, social studies, and French. In college, I ended up with a history major and minors in anthropology and religious studies, but I took a number of math and science and comp sci courses for fun. I still love math and science. Numbers still are magical to me, and playing around with them to see what they can do can waste hours... But looking back, I realize I ended up focusing on areas where my abilities were treated less like a fluke and more like actual talent. I had higher science and math GPAs and took more science classes than the guys in my high school class (and helped them with studying and homework) and they got the science and math awards. I got the English and Humanities awards. (English? Have you seen my grammar? Seriously, it got lost somewhere around second grade.) The same thing continued in college, with certain professors (not all) handing out puzzles in math classes where I was one of two girls and acting surprised when I worked them out. Like I hadn't aced the last four tests in the class while quietly passing notes to my friends and keeping the freshmen in front of us quiet when they started to get bored and act up.
So women can achieve all they want, but it doesn't necessarily mean they aren't going to face subtle discouragement along the way that eventually does end in a gap. I'm a librarian who works with computers, which I guess is my way of compromising and getting to handle a wide variety of topics while still playing with math and science a bit. I play with my little electrical kits at home and build my own computers and whatnot, and I'm happy with my life, but I also suspect that had I been male, I might have gone for math or science as a career instead of a hobby because I wouldn't have been constantly getting the overlooked treatment.
Or maybe not. Still, it's hard for me to discount 20-some years of subtle discouragement in some areas and encouragement in others as having no impact on my life choices.
Re:What achievement gap? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Random bits from the book... (Score:2, Interesting)
"Being a housewife is an illegitimate profession... The choice to serve and be protected and plan towards being a family- maker is a choice that shouldn't be. The heart of radical feminism is to change that." -- Vivian Gornick, feminist author, University of Illinois, The Daily Illini, April 25, 1981.
"In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them" -- Dr. Mary Jo Bane, feminist and assistant professor of education at Wellesley College, and associate director of the school's Center for Research on Woman.
Re:oh, great... (Score:3, Interesting)
Shielding your kids from "girliness" doesn't do them any favors. Teach them that they can be girly AND smart, that they don't have to choose between them, and you'll never run the risk that in a moment of weakness they'll choose girly over smart.
Re:Random bits from the book... (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, just take that stand and stick to it. What feminism *should* be about is simple equality under the law, because that's "the right thing to do." It's been hijacked by some heavy-duty radicals, but that doesn't have to reflect negatively on you. You can take care of your kids and still call yourself a feminist, and if anyone says, in shock, "omfg you believe every word of the SCUM manifesto??" You can calmly say, "no, I believe that men and women should be treated equally under the law" and make no apologies for what other people do.
Re:oh, great... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's actually a completely independent program called "KCD", it consists of two rooms in an otherwise normal elementary school here in fullerton, CA (orangethorpe elementary). And yes we have had to fight for this, battling with the school district to get district transfers, and attending meetings to keep getting funding for the program. It is a quite successful program. I take one day of work off each week to attend the classroom and help the kids.
I have nothing against the differences in males and females, and I love that we are different in some ways. I just hate seeing smart girls never reach their potential (and to be fair, smart boys) and realize they can be smart and beautiful (or for boys, smart and strong?).
Re:Random bits from the book... (Score:4, Interesting)
People don't think less of you by nearly as much as they would think less of a man who wanted that.
Re:Random bits from the book... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Barbie disagrees (Score:3, Interesting)
Some Women fear being left alone with what might be an abusive chauvinist.
Some Men fear being left alone with what might be an abusive, lying, conniving, devious wench.
Either way, you shouldn't discredit his fear of abuse anymore than you should discount those of a woman. I know from experience that contact with the wrong woman can easily become a life changing event. In fact I've been suffering with an inability to commit for several years, based on fear alone. I couldn't imagine going through that kind of abuse at work, and then having to deal with a happy home falling apart because of some psychotic woman I had to go on the road with.
The really unfortunate issue here is that work is actually a great place to determine if someone is safe before you hook up with them, many men and women feel this way, because you can actually get to know people at work seeing them day in and day out.
Re:Math *is* hard (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [uni-muenster.de] which shows just how big a problem the teaching of mathematics has become in some quarters.
Re:Who is the Target Audience? (Score:2, Interesting)
How about: Me ?
I'm a remedial teacher of math and physics (occasionally chemistry, although strictly speaking I'm not qualified for that).
I routinely have to try to get underperforming girls "over the hill" (into the next year of high school).
Although I'm quite sure this book won't give me an array of recipes, just being able to get a glimpse of what girls of that age think is important *and how to relate that to math* will be extremely useful.
I'm off to the [fill-in online bookstore of choice] to buy this book !
Re:Barbie disagrees (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, if someone is new to the field, don't bombard them with specialized terminology, even if it is well-defined and widely used. Speak to be understood, and then introduce the proper terminology as appropriate. The "correct words" are the words *that accomplish your objective*.
I have to teach people, including older ones, how to use software all the time, and without fail I have them comfortably working with it in short time. It's *because* I don't expect them to come in with all sorts of specialized knowledge or figure it out on their own.
Your wife probably doesn't think it's better to use terms like "thing-a-me-bob"; it's just that she doesn't know the right term. She doesn't associate "snipping off the end" with "cropping", and would much prefer to use that latter when someone makes the connection for her.
The other, related problem, is that people convince themselves that what they're doing is more complicated than it really is...