Girls and Math: Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle-School Math without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail by Danica McKellar

Danica McKellar's best-selling new book Math Doesn't Such: How to Survive Middle-School Math goes against the grain of the popular wisdom and decades of folkways to insist that girls can master math as well as boys and that math mastery provides life skills which are beneficial to young women. McKellar, a summa cum laude UCLA graduate in math and an actress with TV credentials from The Wonder Years (where she played Fred Savage's friend Winnie Cooper) to The West Wing to How I Met Your Mother, reveals in her first chapter that she had an attack of math phobia early in seventh grade, totally blanking out on a test she'd prepared for diligently. With the help of an empathetic teacher, however, she successfully navigated advanced courses in high school and came to enjoy math on the college level enough to switch her major, even co-authoring the publication of a new math theorem.

The scientific jury is still out on whether there are neurological differences between males and females in the area of mathematical thinking, with findings pro and con all over the landscape. What is not in question is that American females score thirty-something points lower than their male counterpoints on the SAT and that females tend to take fewer advanced mathematics courses and tend not to follow careers in math and engineering as often as do males.

McKellar clearly comes down on the nurture side of this debate, arguing that attitudes of girls in middle school and ideas about girls in middle school determine their success or failure in mathematics classes. She offers techniques for dealing with teachers and mastering those bugaboos--fractions, decimals and percentages, ratios, and algebraic computation--that most students encounter.

In a format clearly directed at young women--a classy cover photo of the cool-looking actress-author, personality quizzes, math horoscopes, and advice on math behavior around guys--McKellar aims her message at the middle-school student in those years when math aversion and underachievement rear their ugly heads. McKellar points out that mathematics mastery goes a long way in giving young women self confidence and an opening into many satisfying, lucrative and even glamorous careers requiring skills which adolescent math phobias make inaccessible to young women. In an interview with Newsweek, she says:

I'm trying to reach the girls whom traditional mathematical instruction isn't reaching. The ones who love fashion, who love accessories, and who believe that they simply aren't good at math. I want to tell girls that cute and dumb isn't as good as cute and smart.

Clearly, the world needs the talents of all its young people. Phobias and educational myths have no place in the preparation of our children for their future lives. Math Doesn't Suck is a good starting place to begin stamping out that old belief that "girls can't do math."