Math is Girls' Play

Margo Varadi covers an interesting camp run by IBM, on volunteer power.
Mmmm, okay, so this is corporate sponsored, but that doesn't really matter in the context that so many schools have partnerships with IBM. We're not singling out only two schools per country, or something like that. According to IBM's press release, more than 1500 girls will be attending these camps from May to October.

Varadi writes on this one girl's group of 36, in Markham. Listen to this golden nugget; "after just a day and a half, Courtney and her fellow classmates are wondering why school can't be like this. If classrooms were this cool, Courtney says, she wouldn't have struggled so hard to get through her last year. My first two semesters of science I got a 50. she says. I just didn't want to do [science]... it was kinda boring ... This camp has made science more fun. The entire article is full of these kind of insights, most of them coming from the interviews with girls.

This is perfectly juxtaposed to the Miss G article (young women advocating a change in awareness of female role models through women's studies), and works so well with this article because it interviews the students themselves, and finds out their viewpoints on what needs to change in the education system in order to make learning more ... well, memorable. (Now, that's what my university program is spending four years teaching us; make things memorable, that's how your message will stick.)

See my next blog, below this one. I hadn't even analyzed this article yet when I wrote it, but those are my points. Get students into the real world as well as in the class-room, if it takes a community to raise a child, a few teachers can't raise 200 kids in their school alone. Get the community involved! Take learning outside the classroom. Teach children, and, in the case of this article girls, to keep an open mind, and learn how to learn in the real world. Learn how to think and be creative. A student supports my point; "it is best when students can relate to what they're learning; the roller coaster makes all these terms like kinetic energy and potential energy mean something because you have a visual [concrete, real-world] representation. A lot of people can't learn by just listening. This reinforces things you need to learn, like terminology and definitions."

But wait, it gets even better! "The point of EXCITE for IBM is to get girls more interested in technology . The program pairs them up with mentors, women on staff who keep in touch in the year after camp and encourage the students to consider careers in science and IT ..." Good point. Let's give the girls real role models, and people who can take them out of the malls.

The thing I don't like about this location is a couple of the girls seeming obsession with the "stuff" they can get afterwards. They want to make a m$ll$on a year to live their dream life, and IT can take them there. O God. So rich women helping rich girls learn tech, eh? THAT is corporatism.

Now, let's relocate to "inner-city-ness". Give those girls the same chance in the same programs. Get them out of the malls and the gangs, etc, and show them that there is a whole different world out there, and give them more caring and supportive role models (yes, I am suggesting that there may be a few employees in that bunch who are snoodocrats out for tax breaks!) who will be willing to take them on "Big Sister of Canada" style and mentor them into a higher level of self-confidence. That would differentiate the program from others, so that it makes a difference in the world, not just supports some Markham/Brazilian/Thailand rich girls. Hopefully there are many more examples like the latter. Can you imagine living in Habitat for Housing, your parents having not much money, and you being able to go off to camp, and coming home with a mentor that will guide you through your education next year, like a tutor, who will spend time talking with you about how you can make more of yourself, and really getting into your life with you? Wow. I would love that.

NEway, here's another site about technology and girls, enjoy!
http://www.girlsgotech.org/

Miss G Girls II

On to part II. Quotes.
"... four enthusiastic thinkers on a mission. And it is this: to get women's studies onto the high school curriculum ... we're thinking big. we're thinking long-term. This is no summer project for us." After one of the four brings a "Baby Girl, or Sex Toy tube top from her bag, the question arises "Where are the countervailing influences for girls and young women moving through the school system? Why does the prevailing role model in celebrity culture appear to be the (dumb-chick, shopping-mall) Paris Hilton?"

These girls notice the "lack of self-esteem among young women, the rivalry that too often seems to mark their relationships (versus camaraderie among boys), the [scarcity] of women in the existing curriculum, the missed opportunity for intellectual engagement." Yes. I know this. You know what I find most conducive for this camaraderie? Anger outlets, believe it or not. Through sports, mostly. When I was involved in karate, or hockey, I was able to channel my need to exert. When I was doing this, I found that I was able to be much calmer in my relationships with other girls. Catty? Comes from not having anywhere to let out your anger in a productive, fun, camaraderie kind of way.

"Young girls are no different from boys in their need for physical exertion. I find women's fainting spells a direct result from women being indoors all day bent over their needlework confined in restrictive corsets." This is a quote from Little Women with Susan Sarandon.

This is interesting: "the fantastic four have launched their mission with fearsome precision: Miss G. chapters have been launched at the University of Windsor, and Wilfred Laurier and Waterloo; sequential meetings have been had with various representatives of the ministry of education, including a get-together last week with a member of the ministry's curriculum assessment policy division. Not surprisingly, ... the group [does not] believe that pushing for locally developed course options is the answer. We want the Ministry of Education to make a statement that gender equity and women's issues are a priority within the Ontario government."

Yes. That's a statement that needs to be made. I am just concerned that it might turn out to be a "now you have your program, we are politically correct, and don't ask for anything else that would take any work" statement from the government.

One of the girls, Shkordoff makes the point "you're an active citizen. Call your MPP. A side effect of this is to encourage active citizenship." That's another good thing.

And the point Mohan makes is also quite true from the point of the psychology of learning and what behavioural traits are developed in girls by a certain age: "If you're waiting until university, it's too late. It has to be done at an earlier point in time." Exactly.

So, for us adults and young women to be politically active; that's excellent, that's what's supposed to happen with us, that's what we are supposed to do.

But not everyone is political, and there are so many avenues to approach this with. Girl Guides, through to Pathfinders. New Moon magazine. Hockey, or any SPORTS for girls. Girl's clubs in the school system. An IBM tech camp.

Things to get girls out and moving about; things to make them sweat and think.
Things to develop problem solving skills, and the awareness of the power they have to become active in their world.
If girls have these countervailing influences to those of the media, we may just have less anorexic fashion fluff-brains prancing around our city.

Miss G____

Jennifer Wells goes on in the July 23rd Star about Miss G. Long and short of the first page of her article is about a woman in 1873 who dies of whatever diseases, or is "killed" slowly by this male doctor, Edward Clarke, who feels that women cannot possibly make anything of a brain, and simultaneously maintain their feminine role, or feminine reproductive system. Okay. So the guy is brain-dead. I could rant and rave about him, but that's not the point.

With this theme to unite them, four young university women from the University of Western, Ontario are on a mission. Not to promote science or medicine in the classroom, but to promote women's studies. Bare with me while I play devil's advocate. Why women's studies? I wouldn't be interested in women's studies. Kack! Bo-oring. What I would be much more interested in is things like a Girl's Club (this taken from the Girl's Club that my Mom ran out of her elementary school for years. This was a chance for these girls to meet role models who are currently alive and at work in their communities, a place for girls to talk about business, science, sexuality, religion, abortion (one girl had one ... ) anything.

I am all for promoting girl's groups, clubs, education, and especially role models. But I am not sure that I would want to do it in the form of women's studies. I hope those girl's don't think it will be some wonderful thing that rocks the school world. The girls will be sitting there dutifully in the classroom, listening to some teacher who's only interested in the paycheck dictate from some textbook about some Emily Stowe. Great.

What about bringing the girls to the ice rink, and teaching them hockey? Get Z, AJ (Angela James) or Cassie Campbell out on the ice with them? Those are the women we got to interact with. They were kick-ass role models, and they've won gold in the Olympics for years! What about inviting the girls to an Aeros game, and letting them interview the players, or organize a dinner with those hockey players if teaching the students to play is too much? They'll learn interviewing skills, and be able to find out that these role models are real, not some diseased Dr. Chick from 1867 who died. I don't think most highschool girls can really understand the concept of Martyr.

If the point of women's studies is to inspire and educate MORE young women, and get them more interested in what women should be like, and not the media stereotype, then don't just "blow into the newsroom"; get out on a community level and get groups of girls going!

Beginnings

Kabuki: those who hear not the music think the dancer's mad. Emi is lost in motion ... when we find her. Slowly dancing with the ghost of music past.

Small Gods: Now consider the tortoise and the eagle. The tortoise is a ground-living creature. It is impossible to live nearer the ground without being under it ...

The Buddha of Suburbia: My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost. I am often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two old histories.

I am trying to write a book.
I haven't written anything but school essays, class notes, and doodling in my diary for years.
Now, I want to write a (short) graphic novel.
I have to do it in less than 2 months.
Let me re-phrase that: my goal is to create a short story that has wit, uses illustrations extensively to highlight and augment the story-telling process, and is applicable to an audience largely comprised of young adults (18-24). This will be a story of self-discovery, well, for the main character anyway.

Haha. Very funny. But I need to have faith that this is actually possible. Well, some sort of book better be possible, because I am taking book design this year and I am there4ore required to come up with SOMETHING. I have been interested in this kind of thing for a while; my Dad and my friend keep feeding me comic books and graphic novels, etc, my best friend of 9 years is almost over her head in anime, RPG, she's an author, etcetc, and these interests are things that she's shared with me ....
So it would seem to be a logical choice. That, and I'm not really interested in a book about cats, bicycles, politics, or the extinction of dinosaurs. I've been to so many art shows with my Dad, seen different arts magazines, spent a year in Art Fundamentals at Sheridan; a blessed year doing NOTHING but doodling (with marks attached at the other end), and I want to produce a book from all of it.

Oi. So to start, I want to study a few books, find out their themes, their character development, the language, pacing and plotline. And somehow use all that information to try to sculpt a story. Then maybe, after the course is over, get it published.

But I'm beginning to think the extinction of dinosaurs might be an easier topic; one that I could handle almost without thinking.