Math Therapy
Math Therapy explores the root causes of math trauma, and the empowering ways we can heal from it. Each week host Vanessa Vakharia, aka The Math Guru, dives into what we get right and wrong about math education, and chats with some of today’s most inspiring and visionary minds working to make math more accessible, diverse, and fun for students of all ages. Whether you think you’re a "math person" or not, you’re about to find out that math people don’t actually exist – but the scars that math class left on many of us, definitely do. And don’t worry, no calculators or actual math were involved in the making of this podcast ;)
Math Therapy
S4E06: From mathochistic to mathcurious w/ A.K. Whitney
This one’s for all the adults out there who are like “hmmm maybe it’s not too late to learn a little math…”! On today’s episode Vanessa talks to journalist A.K. Whitney, who went back to school at 38 to learn math and chronicled it in Cosmopolitan, The Washington Post, and her own podcast/website delightfully titled “The Mathochism Project”. She is basically the definition of overcoming math trauma and making it less of a stigma - but how did she do it? Why don’t more people do it? And how can we make math less traumatic for women and girls?
About A.K.
A.K. Whitney is a journalist with 25 years of experience in print and online. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Cosmopolitan and more. She was a regular contributor to Noodle, an educational website, writing mostly about society’s fraught relationship with math, which is the subject of her website, The Mathochism Project.
Show notes:
- A.K.’s article for Cosmopolitan: How I Finally Got Over My Fear of Math
- A.K’s article for The Washington Post: Why did I give up on math? Ask my mom.
- The Ohio State MOOC calculus course that A.K. recommends
- An article about “the cult of genius” from the mathematician, Jordan Ellenberg, who coined the term
- The CBC article explaining why saying “it’s not rocket science” isn’t fair to other professions
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