As the math education crisis in this country continues to make headlines, research continues to prove that it is in middle school when math scores begin to drop-especially for girls-in large part due to the relentless social conditioning that tells girls they “can’t do” math, and that math is “uncool.” Young girls today need strong female role models to embrace the idea that it’s okay to be smart-in fact, it’s sexy to be smart!

It’s Danica McKellar’s mission to be this role model, and demonstrate on a large scale that math doesn’t suck. In this fun and accessible guide, McKellar-dubbed a “math superstar” by The New York Times-gives girls and their parents the tools they need to master the math concepts that confuse middle-schoolers most, including fractions, percentages, pre-algebra, and more. Read the rest of this entry »

In all the current highly publicized debates about creationism and its descendant “intelligent design,” there is an element of the controversy that is rarely mentioned—the evidence, the empirical truth of evolution by natural selection. Even Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, while extolling the beauty of evolution and examining case studies, have not focused on the evidence itself.

Yet the proof is vast, varied, and magnificent, drawn from many different fields of science. Scientists are observing species splitting into two and are finding more and more fossils capturing change in the past—dinosaurs that have sprouted feathers, fish that have grown limbs.
Why Evolution Is True weaves together the many threads of modern work in genetics, paleontology, geology, molecular biology, and anatomy that demonstrate the “indelible stamp” of the processes first proposed by Darwin. Read the rest of this entry »

“It is fun to figure out the puzzle of how children go about making sense of mathematics and then how to help teachers help kids.” John A. Van de Walle, Late of Virginia Commonwealth University This is the philosophy behind Elementary and Middle School Mathematics: Teaching Developmentally. John A. Van de Walle wrote this book to help students understand mathematics and become confident in their ability to teach the subject to children in kindergarten through eighth grade.

Learning through problem solving is another major theme of this book. Read the rest of this entry »