Ashley Milne-Tyte

Bedtime Math

July 31, 2012

Listen here. Aired on NPR's Morning Edition.

I heard about Laura Overdeck's nonprofit Bedtime Math completely by accident while having coffee with a friend of hers a few weeks ago. Overdeck was always good at math (to put it mildly - she majored in astrophysics) and wanted her kids to be too, but was concerned about the bad rap math has in this country. She wanted her children to find it fun and use it in everyday life, just as she had as a kid. So when her eldest child was two she and her husband started giving her a math problem each night. What started out as a family ritual has gone viral and now several thousand people receive her daily email containing a few kid-friendly math problems for kids and their parents to work through. Her point is that the more enjoyable and natural numbers are when children are little, the easier it will be for them to deal with math classes at school so that 'math anxiety' has less chance to set in, as it does with many children (me included). Listen to the piece to hear from Laura Overdeck, University of Chicago psychology professor and math anxiety expert Sian Beilock, and a couple of parents and their children working through some bedtime math.

There's another side to this story that I couldn't fit into the NPR piece. Laura Overdeck is particularly eager for more girls to become math fans and believes that by introducing them to numbers in a fun way at a young age, they have a far better chance of not turning away from the subject later on. Sian Beilock has done research that shows little girls pick up on older women's anxiety about math (mothers, teachers) and that this hurts their own math proficiency. 

Coming soon

July 24, 2012

I've spent the last week and a half juggling teaching, reporting two public radio stories, and planning the next episode of The Broad Experience. I hope the first story, for NPR, will air quite soon. I have yet to edit the second (for Marketplace) and don't know yet when that will air. One is about kids and math literacy and the other revolves around family businesses. Both pieces have been really fun to work on so I hope the results make for good listening. Stay tuned.

Sexist marketing to little girls - or is it?

December 7, 2011

Listen here. Aired on NPR's Morning Edition.

T-shirt slogans like 'I'm too pretty to do Homework' and 'Allergic to Algebra' have grabbed attention in the last few months. The first shirt, from JC Penney, was only available on its website for a few days before an online outcry led the retailer to pull it. Forever 21 followed suit by removing 'Allergic to Algebra' less than two weeks later. You don't have to look far to notice young girls' shirts are covered in soft images like cupcakes, rainbows, unicorns and, often, slogans noting the wearer's good looks (and occasionally their lack of appetite - if not aptitude - for schoolwork). Some parents are disgusted by what they see as sexist messaging that essentially tells young girls to celebrate their looks and not much else. Others think the first group has lost its sense of humor. And then there are those who point out that boys' shirts are just as 'sexist' in their own way (a couple of slogans I noted on boys' shirts that you'd never see on girls': 'I'm the Boss' and 'My Life, My Rules'). 

This story also looks at the ability of petition site Change.org to get retailers to respond to customer pressure. Note all the comments on the NPR site. There's a real debate going on about what's sexist and what, some commenters feel, is 'extortion' by parents ganging up on retailers. 

New Jersey school lunches

August 18, 2009

Listen here. Aired on Marketplace. 

New Jersey had a new school funding formula approved in 2009. For the poorest children to get all the funds they're entitled to, they must be signed up for free school lunches. So school districts are on a mission to make sure every eligible child is on that list. But not every parent is willing to sign up their child. This story takes a look at what the Newark school district is doing to convince them.

Ikea babysitting

July 20, 2009

Listen here. Aired on the Marketplace Morning Report.

Lots of people go for day trips to Ikea, letting the kids run through the aisles and then settling down for a lunch of Swedish meatballs. But lately, more and more parents seem to be using Smaland, the Ikea 'ball pit', as a free babysitting service.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/32739524@N02/

Scrimping at Christmas

December 17, 2008

Listen here. Aired on the Marketplace Morning Report.  

The first Christmas after the financial crisis found a lot of families doing things differently. I talked to Oregon mother-of-three Julia Koponick about how she and her husband were handling Christmas this year, and how they were talking to the kids about their need to cut back. I also spoke to her eight-year-old, Joshua, who was admirably sanguine about the whole thing.