guest post series

Natalya St. Clair is the author of three TedEd talks on the mathematics of art, music, and language.

Mathematics and Studio Art may seem like an unexpected pair of majors, but I never had trouble combining the two. I always knew that I wanted to be an artist. I can even remember telling my first grade teacher that I wanted to grow up to be an artist. I also had a fascination for astronomy and physics, which helped me describe the world in a way I could understand it.

Over the next few months, we'll be featuring guest posts and interviews with a variety of women around a variety of topics related to Princess Awesome. vaneSSa is The Math Guru!

Hello, hello! My name is Vanessa. I am the founder/director of learning and inspiration of The Math Guru, a boutique math and science tutoring studio in uptown Toronto which I started almost four years ago! Why did I decide to do such a thing, you ask? Well, when I was in high school, I actually failed Grade Eleven math twice. Twice! Like many people who haven’t found their educational guru, I hated math - until one day, I found mine.

Deena Skolnick Weisberg is a Senior Fellow at the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

I’m a developmental psychologist, and my research studies how young children grow and develop. So I know, both from my own experiences growing up and from my academic studies, how important it is that all children feel that all their needs and wishes are respected. Sometimes these needs and wishes seems contradictory to adults or even to other children, like being a boy and liking pink, or being a girl and wanting to play hockey. But these needs and wishes are experienced by children simply as things that they like and that make them happy, and should be respected as such.