Day One on the Journey to the City of Mastery

I have been working, weakly - not weekly, I'm afraid - on a short novel for girls, provisionally called something like "Areya's Journey to the City of Mastery", that I wish could also teach math. Recently, I also signed up for a short course in HTML/CSS, and see that it might be much more useful for me to design a website that takes girls - or anyone else who might be interested, for that matter - through some of the math that tween girls are exposed to, during the time when they begin to absorb the messages they receive from society at large that tells them they should hate math, or that girls aren't good at math, or boys don't like girls who are good at math. And today I received the math book I bought to support this idea of creating a website based on a story that requires math facility to progress from one section of the story to the next. The book is Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail by Danica MeKellar. She is a TV actress and has had parts on "The West Wing" and "The Wonder Years", and she is a gifted mathematician, as it turns out. According to the dust jacket of the book,

"... her work in mathematics, most notably for her role as coauthor of a groundbreaking mathematical physics theorem, which bears her name (The Chayes-McKellar-Winn Theorem)."

So, my point in setting up this new blog is to ramble on a bit about my progress in designing this online book/resource/story to teach some math to tween girls, and to also babble a bit about my adventures in going through Dr. McKellar's book, relearning what I'll need to know, in order to put appropriate math content into my website. Oh,and the other reason this project interests me is that I remember vividly being one of those girls who was good at math, but sucked up the social messages about how girls can't do math between sixth and seventh grade. In sixth grade I was the best in my class at whatever math we were doing, and by 7th grade I was having trouble with a basic algebra class. The rest, as they say, is history, I'm sorry to say. ;-)

Dr. McKellar's book's Table of Contents