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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American Girl’s 2022 Girl of the Year is Asian! But she’s not the first

Let’s celebrate – American Girl’s 2022 Girl of the Year doll is Corrine Tan, a Chinese American character hailing from Colorado! She also comes with a “little sister” doll, Gwynn, the first time American Girl (hereafter AG) has packaged a Girl of the Year with a sibling. Neither my daughters nor I have read the Corrine books yet, but reportedly, Corrine explores her Asian heritage as part of her storyline, and she even has to deal with anti-Asian prejudice on some level. And AG tapped none other than Wendy Shang, author of the popular middle grade novel The Great Wall of Lucy Wu, to pen the Corrine stories. Big thanks to AG and its parent company Mattel!

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Stop Sexual Assault in Schools Now Has Resources in Chinese!

My friends Esther Warkov and Joel Levin and their team at the nonprofit Stop Sexual Assault in Schools (SSAIS) have worked for many years to provide resources and advocacy on matters of sexual harassment, assault, and rape in K-12 schools. Now they’re pleased to provide several of their resources translated into Chinese!

Xinyi He (何心怡), a Rutgers University grad student and an Indiana University alumna, has been working as an intern for SSAIS, and she has done the marvelous work of rendering several of SSAIS’ publications into Simplified Chinese. She’s also written and created other Chinese-language and culturally-friendly resources for SSAIS, too! I’m delighted to share some of them here.

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