'Wonder Years' actress: 'Smart is cool' (AP/CNN) {writes about math for girls}

[eppur_se_muova]

NEW YORK (AP) -- Danica McKellar has a message for girls: Cute and smart is better than cute and dumb.

McKellar, who played Winnie on the 1990s television show "The Wonder Years," is coming out with a book, "Math Doesn't Suck," to encourage girls to get into math.

"When girls see the antics of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, they think that being fun and glamorous also means being dumb and irresponsible," the 32-year-old McKellar told Newsweek for editions to hit newsstands Monday.

"But I want to show them that being smart is cool," she said. "Being good at math is cool. And not only that, it can help them get what they want out of life."

McKellar should know. The actress once struggled with the subject around the seventh grade, but a teacher helped her through. McKellar eventually majored in math in college. She co-authored a scientific paper while a student at UCLA.
***
more: http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/TV/07/30/people.mckellar.ap/index.html

My recommended book: "In Code: A Mathematical Journey"
by Sarah Flannery & David Flannery. May make you want to send your kids to Ireland to be educated. :)

[BuyingThyme]

1. Winnie's hot!

[TahitiNut]

12. Hey! All us Math Majors are hot!

:silly:

[Cha]

32. Just look at how Winnie has

grown up!

We need more of this..brava for Danica McKellar!~

[Drunken Irishman]

2. Danica McKellar, yum.

[Spinzonner]

5. Yeah, that has intellect written all over it

:sarcasm:

[KaptBunnyPants]

7. I'll see if I can get her to apologize to you about not joining a nunnery.

So, do you immediately write off all attractive women you see as bimbos?

[Spinzonner]

10. Not at all

I know women as each and both.

I just think she should decide which message she's marketing

[Drunken Irishman]

15. You can be sexy and smart.

I don't see how this hurts her message at all. Unless you're insinuating that anyone who poses seductively is automatically a moron.

[Spinzonner]

16. She can be anything she has the ability to and wants

But you can't necessarily send multiple messages to a target group of people and achieve the result you want

And you really need to stop creating straw-person arguments. I never said anything about her being a moron or anything else for that matter.

[Drunken Irishman]

23. What multiple messages?

I'm confused here. She said women can be cute and smart and that not everyone that is cute automatically should be associated with being dumb (like Paris and Lindsay Lohan). I don't see a mixed message here at all. She's sexy, she knows she's sexy, she wants to show the world she's sexy...but also wants to show another side, as well. You can pose scantly and still discuss intelligence without coming off as a hypocrite.

[Spinzonner]

24. It would seem that posing 'sexy' as she did

is being used as a commodity. I don't see that is a case of 'being' cute.

And who said she was being a hypocrite ? You do seem addicted to Straw-man arguments.

[Drunken Irishman]

25. You pretty much did.

No straw-man argument here, bud. You stated she should pick which image she wants to market, which would suggest saying one thing and doing another makes her a hypocrite. Well she never said women couldn't be pretty, or sexy. She just said that people shouldn't automatically associate that with Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, who obviously act as if they have minimal intelligence.

[tkmorris]

22. She's being consistent

She's saying, "Let's multiply".

[4_TN_TITANS]

29. Good one!!!!!!!!

:rofl: :evilgrin:

[gatorboy]

8. She graduated summa cum laude from UCLA in mathematics.

She could probably out intellect many here..Clothing or not. :P

[orleans]

9. here's the winnie i remember

[Deja Q]

17. Dang. Who needs a popsicle to lick on a hot day? She'd melt anyone from half a room away!

[originalpckelly]

19. Raise my power, please!

:spank:

[Ezlivin]

3. Damn, she could make a man's asymptote rise right up

Not that I'd get anywhere near her x-axis.

[Sherman A1]

4. Great!!!

It's a message that needs to get to ALL kids not just girls or not just boys, but ALL of them.

:bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce:

[Sequoia]

6. Thanks for the head's up.

I sure wish that book had been around when I was in middle school. Winnie sure grew up to be beautiful. Some child stars don't grow up cute, like the boy in that show, and Beaver to name two.

[yurbud]

11. the pic of her on the article is great

[BlooInBloo]

13. I heart Winnie. I wish there had been more girls in my grad program.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

14. I always thought that

As a kid, it was the cute girls with glasses and brains that always seemed to be the most sexy to me, especially if they had an English accent. It just seemed to me that they were hiding a smoldering passion underneath the cool, aloof intellectual exterior. And there was actually someone interesting to talk to, once you got to know them.

[tech3149]

18. The responses to this thread have been all over the place

But I'll agree on a few major points. Smart is sexy. Danica is a beautiful young lady that caught my eye years ago and I'm smart enough to know I'm too old to do anything but fantasize. If I could have studied with someone like her, I'd probably remember much more Math than I do.

[DemBones DemBones]

20. This is good news. Girls need encouragement to take more math and

science. Early in life, they get the message that those are boys' subjects. :eyes:

We need better math and science programs in our schools, with better teachers and better funding. Too many teachers are teaching out of field and funding isn't high enough. When I taught public school, I never had enough of the materials I needed to teach biology or physical sciences although the state mandates that science students are supposed to spend 25% of their class time in hands-on lab activities. I used to joke about taking my Labrador to school for hands-on Lab activities, but it wasn't really a laughing matter, trying to come up with enough lab activities for my students.

[DemBones DemBones]

21. Double post.

[Enrique]

26. I wish she left out the "cute" part

I think it might be a bummer for not-so-cute girls to read this:

"I want to tell girls that cute and dumb isn't as good as cute and smart," she said.

[tomreedtoon]

27. Smart is not cool. But cool is not good.

Smart isn't "cool." Responsible sex isn't "cool." Taking care of children if you have them isn't "cool."

The whole problem is the belief that "cool" is something good. I'll bet most of you don't know how "cool" came about.

Black musicians faced prejudice and racism all day long. But when they played music in clubs, white people thought they could deny their racism by praising the musicians' craftsmanship and art. Now, yelling back insults at the evil honky racists wouldn't help them pay the bills and could hurt them. So, through some genius invention, the black jazzmen acknowledged the white people's praise somewhat indifferently. That was the birth of "cool."

The problem is that this solution, intended to help deflect racism, became a general solution for all kinds of people to express indifference. It allowed people to cut off needed emotions and let them turn their backs on problems, their own or other people's. So you're addicted to heroin? Cool. So your sister committed suicide? Cool. So your brother was killed in an illegal war for oil? Cool.

It is time to recognize that cool has its limits. In fact, cool has become cold.

[eppur_se_muova]

28. I tend to agree, but one step at a time.

"Cool" among teenagers seems to equate with deliberately wasteful and pointless. Maybe not the same standard applies among more mature types.

[WinkyDink]

30. Well, studying LITERATURE isn't exactly for dummies.

Literature encompasses mythology, philosophy, art, religion, history, technological developments, sociology, semantics, rhetoric, current events, and psychology.
There's a reason there are no "child prodigies" in literature, as there are in mathematics.

[Lisa]

31. I think I've found the paper -- she's second author

Not a bad place in the lineup (that's usually where I am when my prof and I write something). Note that it's already been cited twice!

Title: Percolation and Gibbs states multiplicity for ferromagnetic Ashkin-Teller models on Z(2)
Author(s): Chayes L, McKellar D, Winn B
Source: JOURNAL OF PHYSICS A-MATHEMATICAL AND GENERAL 31 (45): 9055-9063 NOV 13 1998
Document Type: Article
Language: English
Cited References: 15 Times Cited: 2
Abstract: For a region of the nearest-neighbour ferromagnetic Ashkin-Teller spin systems on Z(2), we characterize the existence of multiple Gibbs states via percolation. In particular, there are multiple Gibbs states if and only if there exists percolation of any of the spin types (i.e. the magnetized states are characterized by percolation of the dominant species). This result was previously known only for the Potts models on Z(2).

[THUNDER HANDS]

33. really, shouldn't this message be for guys?

Aren't there more women in college now than men?

[Lisa]

34. true -- that's been the case (at least for North America, on average) for years now (n/t)

[BlooInBloo]

36. Girls' attrition in math & the other sciences is quite striking as you go up the...

... educational food chain.

The end result is that for no very good reason, girls end up being psych & business majors rather than math & physics. And it's worse at Master's level. And worse yet at Ph.D. level.

The metric "how many of each gender are in college" is far to coarse a tool to talk about the phenomenon of interest here.

[porphyrian]

35. Sorry, being good at math is not cool.

You aren't necessarily uncool for being good at math, but let's not lie to kids about something they already know.