eee, Winnie!

[hth]

So everybody remembers Danica McKellar as one of the authors of the Chayes-McKellar-Winn Theorem, right? Oh -- from The Wonder Years? Okay, then!

Either way, my second-favorite REAL LIFE physicist (I admit I have the world's biggest crush on Neil DeGrasse Tyson) is launching a book and website to convince middle-school aged girls that, yea verily, Math Doesn't Suck. Words cannot express how much I want to hug her for this.

The moral bankruptcy of the bizarre, insular universe we've abandoned teenage girls into in this culture worries the shit out of me. I think it particularly freaks me out because I was sort of interestingly sheltered as a teenager -- I went to nationally-ranked public schools in a university town that's famous for its ferocious protectiveness of education, and all the popular girls in my school were in my honors classes -- and were mostly type-A chicks and highly competitive about their grades. Apparently that's pretty rare, in the grand scheme of things. But it does give me hope, because it's more proof to me that teenagers aren't crazy, unmanageable beasts, but do tend to do the things they think they're *expected* to do. I mean, yes, sure, teenage rebellion -- but at the same time, in a healthy environment, teenagers are trying to figure out how to get validated, how to be looked at as real and important and somebody. They learn how to do that from the adult-run world around them, so yeah, my thing has always been, why isn't the adult-run world INNUNDATING girls with the message that women are real and important because of what they do, what they can create and produce and perform?

Oh, right -- because for "adult-run" read "adult-male-run," and assume that the ultimate subconscious goal isn't to raise real and important women, but to supply men with a giant captive herd of obedient young women whose first emotional priority is being visually pleasing and sexually available to men. What the hell good are they if they're spending all their time doing *math,* for Christ's sake?

Well, anyway. For whatever weird reason, we always believe things that are in print or on television more than we believe what actual people say to us, so I think this book is a good thing, the next step past good parenting (which you can hope for but never really count on) and good teaching (which I'm all for, but with the teacher shortages going on all over the country, too often schools have no choice but to take what they can get). More girl-targeted media that doesn't insult my values and stunt girls' intellectual development? Hell, yeah.

Comments

[pocketmouse]

I thought Talking Barbie was right: 'Math's hard. Let's go shopping!'

Shopping for MATH BOOKS!!!

slightly left of topic

[thelastgoodname.livejournal.com]

This week's Time magazine's cover article is "The Boys are All Right." The lede? "We've been fretting about them for a decade. But young men are better off, socially and academically, than ever." And the picture that goes with it is a troop of white teenage boys looking very white and very boyish, and frankly, very much like they're about to rape a girl (of any race) or beat up some brown boy. I can't even express my anger about this unnecessary worrying about boys, when every single indicator available says that women are excluded from just about every single important or lauded field in the world, from politics to science to business.

So: Time agrees that women's real role is to be pleasing to all the poor misunderstood (white) boys who aren't getting a fair shake because people are so concerned with the girls, and also to be invisible to policy makers and the general public because girls don't matter.

[soho-iced.livejournal.com]

The idea of this happening to scientifically inclined girls makes me both angry and baffled. To be safe, my current plan is for any daughter/s I may have to go a single-sex school, as I did. My social life may have been a bit more limited than it would otherwise have been, but it meant I never had to worry about any of this: the idea that someone might look down on me for doing science once I got to university (which didn't happen anyway) was just weird.

[indywind]

Thanks for both links, Hth... Can I link this post on some teachers' comms I read? I'd think there will be some math/science teachers who would like to include these positive role models in their teaching.

[namastenancy.livejournal.com]

Well, at least there is one voice crying in the wilderness. I remember when the "Take your daughter to work" movement started and immediately, there was a chorus of voices crying about excluding the "poor boys. " So, immediately girls were shoved aside because the idea that even one day a year might be devoted to them was too much. I also was very unimpressed with the theory that "poor boys" are getting a raw deal in (fill in the blank). I'm glad to see that Time has debunked that myth but the solution doesn't seem to be to work for gender equality but to pat pat pat boys on the head and give them even more.