How's about those positive role models?

My friend showed me this video of Patricia Heaton at Guest Week on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire". (Skip to about 3:00.)

It isn't often that I yell at videos, but this is ridiculous. As soon as anything with numbers showed up on the screen, she completely shut down even before looking at the question. This is a grown woman freaking out about middle school math. A kid would look at the video and say, "She can't do math and got to be famous. I can do that too!" Never mind the fact that when Regis walked her through it, she was perfectly capable of solving the problem.

A defeatist attitude is lethal to learning math or any other subject. Unfortunately, mathematics often gets the short end of the stick in situations like these; that's what credit cards are for, right? It's a lot easier to get away with never doing simple, mental calculations than to get through life unable to write a cohesive paragraph. Who cares that you can't balance your own checkbook, as long as you can write thank-you notes to your generous donors. 

Does anyone know of a celebrity who likes doing math in public, and is proud of it? Who knows, maybe Patricia is just stuck in a junior high mindset and doesn't want to be called out as a nerd. 

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“For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics”  (NYT 8/6/09)

“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians. And I’m not kidding.” -Hal Varian, chief economist at Google

Math stole the front page of the New York Times today. In short, it claimed that a good number of the careers that will pop up in the next decade are going to be based on a math-heavy education, namely the field of statistics. With the growing number of technologies born to process huge quantities of information, we need more human intelligence to do something with all of it, and to make those technologies more efficient.

One example:

A while back, MIT experimented by giving 100 students Blackberries that tracked their movements and actions on campus. One small step for Big Brother, one large step for statisticians. It’s one thing to have a massive amount of data on record about your student body; the hard part is focusing on a specific trend, and extrapolating from it. Humans come into play by deciding how to organize the information into something useful, or at least interesting. 

The headline for the general public, or least for school-age students, should be shouted loud and clear: Math is everywhere, not just in your textbooks. You don’t have to be a typical “nerd” to find something that catches your attention in the field of mathematical applications. Most people take advantage of forms of advanced mathematics every day, and anyone with the right kind of analytical mind could contribute to the field in ways yet unimagined. 

For once, math education is being glorified based on something other than only salary! (Though, going by the jobs mentioned in the article, that part doesn’t sound too shabby either.) Soon, the secret will be revealed that math can, in fact, be cool to study. And that it involves far more than learning techniques and regurgitating them on worksheets. You could land a gig delving into technologies we take for granted, and making them even better and more user-friendly. Who wouldn’t want to take part in that? I don’t know how many pre-college students are going to read this article, but I would encourage them to do so, before they make up their minds to dismiss math completely.

“You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy?”  (NYT 11/30/08)