http://www.wired.com/culture/education/news/2007/08/winniecooper_QA
The actress who played Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years, Danica McKellar, is a self-proclaimed math advocate for girls who might otherwise shy away from a subject that Barbie once famously described as "hard."
McKellar's math book for junior high girls, called Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle-School Math and not Break a Nail, will be at bookstores Thursday. It has the look and feel of a teen magazine, but puts heavy emphasis on fractions and pre-algebra.
Graduating summa cum laude from UCLA with a degree in mathematics, McKellar is also co-author of a <http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/files/mckellar_proof.pdf>published proof. She has testified before Congress on math education and served as a substitute teacher.
Each chapter includes clear explanations that make manipulating numbers sound easy. "A reciprocal of a fraction is found by flipping it upside down. If you want the reciprocal of a mixed number or a whole number, just convert it to an improper fraction, and then flip it!" or "Going back and forth between percents and decimals is very easy. All you need to do is take away the % sign, then move the decimal point two places -- that's it!"
The book includes horoscopes, testimonials, cute doodles and quotes from girls. Word problems are brought to life with descriptions of lipstick, beads, cookies and similarly girly examples that might make the feminist in some women cringe. In the interview below, McKellar explains why being a math whiz and a girly girl are not mutually exclusive. Wired News spoke to her by phone from her home in Los Angeles.
<snip> -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
