InsaneJournal

Math is hard! (not when you're Winnie Cooper!)
Dannica McKellar is one smart cookie.

She graduated from UCLA with a degree in mathematics, is co-author of a friggin' proof, has testified before congress AND has been a substitute teacher.

Now she's a young adult author, having written a magazine-style math book for middle school girls.

Now on the one hand, this is all great...in theory. We really do need to be encouraging girls to, at the very least, not abhor math. I absolutely hate math. I just could never, ever get it (I think it started back in 4th grade, when we had to do these timed worksheets of 100 problems. First the addition, then subtraction, then multiplication and finally division. You only got to move on to the next sheet if you'd completed the previous one with no mistakes. I never got past the subtraction sheet :-( ). I even had completely non-traditional math teachers throughout most of school - my middle school math teachers were women and half of mine in high school were as well.

But I couldn't get it. And now that I know I'm going into a career where I definitely do not need math, I have no incentive to try to learn it now.

So McKellar is trying to prevent there from being another me by writing her math book, that emphasizes how math is used in every day life - y'know, when you bake cookies and go shopping.

~headdesk~

This is where my admiration for the book falls apart (but increases for Wired, because they called her out on the exact concerns I had going into the article). Yes, there are plenty of girls who don't seem to care about anything beyond how they look, but should we be encouraging that? What about the girls like me who would rather have taken an algebra test than buy lipstick? How will these young, impressionable girls know there's another option out there for them if it's not presented to them?

Wired also brings up that this may just be encouraging the girls to be more materialistic. McKellar laughs that off, saying that they already are, and this book isn't going to change anything. No, it's probably not going to turn a switch in someone's head to say "I NEED MORE MAKEUP NOW!!!!!!!!!!" but again, it's not presenting them with other options.

In Dannica McKellar's world, it appears there are two choices for women: vapid and fashionable, or mathematically inclined and fashionable. Where do the rest of us fit in?