The Challenge: Write down one big dream of yours. Draw or find a picture to go with it and put it somewhere you will see it often.
It’s another one of those nights where the Create365 Project collides neatly with the Escape Plan. I get to talk about something important to me and share my awful drawing skills all in one shot!
One big dream of mine is girls who don’t feel stupid in math and science classes. I’ve had way too many girls sit down in front of me and tell me they’re failing math because they’re a girl. In every single case, the fact that they’re a girl has had absolutely nothing to do with it.
What I really would love to create eventually is a product designed to show girls that they can be happy and successful working with math and science, and then help them learn the skills…or at least get a good, broad foundation.
This is actually what stopped the Dead Bunny project. I was starting to work on the videos, which are all labeled “Dead Bunny’s Guide to ____”. In my head, Dead Bunny has always been a boy bunny. I was the one narrating the videos, and I’m not a boy. And I knew that, while I’m trying to design something useful to all students, the target audience in my mind was that fourteen-year-old girl who thought the entire reason she couldn’t pass her math class was her gender.
There was a serious conflict going on there, one I haven’t resolved yet. But I keep playing with ideas on how I want to approach presenting these math and science skills and how to make something that will encourage girls to be something other than an outdated stereotype. (Hopefully, my lovely scientific companion will be much improved before she becomes something actually associated with my curriculum design work…)
I’m a geeky girl who hopes to share her love of math and science with future geeky girls. That’s my one big dream!
