“Alligator Alcatraz” Echoes Angel Island

“Alligator Alcatraz,” as a grotesquely flippant nickname for a Florida incarceration camp, makes light of what will happen to the people there. It’s really an inaccurate comparison as well, since Alcatraz was a max-security prison for America’s most violent, already-convicted criminals. The more accurate comparison would be with Alcatraz’s neighbor in San Francisco Bay, Angel Island, just two miles away. Like Alcatraz, Angel Island is surrounded by cold, shark-infested waters. Unlike Alcatraz, it was, from 1910-1940, a federal immigration station that processed 550,000 travelers to the U.S.

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Natalie Nakase and Kaitlyn Chen give us two huge reasons to be Golden State Valkyries fans

As a resident of Orange County, I live in L.A. Sparks country, as far as WNBA fandom goes. But as soon as the expansion Golden State Valkyries named Natalie Nakase, a friend of this blog, as their first head coach, I was a committed GSV fan!

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Why Women’s History Month Matters in Math Classrooms

Despite plenty of research to the contrary, I still hear people repeat the biggest myth in math education – boys are better at math than girls. It’s sad that a stereotype so thoroughly debunked continues to live on; it’s even sadder that this perception continues to have real, negative impacts on girls and women. It’s one of the reasons they’re more frequently discouraged by parents and others in their lives from pursuing majors and careers in STEM fields. I strongly suspect it also plays a part in girls reporting math anxiety more frequently than boys do. And recent research tells us that for some girls, it even hurts the academic bottom line – in the gradebook, when the unconscious bias of some math teachers leads to lower scores for their female students.

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