Girls and Math: Kiss My Math: Showing Pre-Algebra Who's Boss by Danica McKellar

Last summer Danica McKellar's runaway best-seller Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail, for girls aged 10-12, hit bookstore shelves with a stereotype-shattering theme: females can shine at math and still sparkle in the girly girl department. Author McKellar, who played Winnie Cooper on the long-running television series The Wonder Years, is living proof of her own point: a successful working actress (The West Wing, How I Met Your Mother) is also a published mathematician whose personal crusade is to convince girls that math mastery should be part of their "wonder years." Forget beautiful but dumb, she insists; cute and smart is the way to go for girls.

Now McKellar has a follow-up guide for girls 12-14, titled Kiss My Math: Showing Pre-Algebra Who's Boss, which promises to show girls how to be successful in pre-algebra, digging in to tough topics like integers, variables, absolute values, and exponents. Keeping to her lively, informal teen magazine format, McKellar mixes personal anecdotes from her own school days, reader polls, personality quizzes, and testimonials from readers of her first book with expert help in slaying the math dragon: step-by-step instructions, sample problems with detailed explanations, tips and tricks for saving time on homework, copious examples of the use of these math principles in daily life, and her crucial "Math Test Survival Guide."

Danica McKellar holds to the guiding principles of her first book: 1) girls can compete in mathematics on any level and 2) proficiency in math is necessary to give girls the opportunity for successful and glamorous careers. Coming hard behind the recently published study in Science showing that American girls' scores are now commensurate with those of boys, McKellar's just published book should be on every middle-school girl's school supplies list.

To meet the needs of this century, America needs more home-grown scientists and mathematicians. Half of them can be women.

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."