Preskenis Dinner:  NES/MAA Dinner Meeting in Memory of Kenneth J. Preskenis.  Please left-click to go to the NES/MAA home page.

 

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Sixteenth - 2018

The Sixteenth Annual NES/MAA Dinner Meeting in Memory of Kenneth J. Preskenis was held on Wednesday, April 18, 2018. Dr. Reva Kasman, Salem State University, gave the Preskenis Lecture, "From Arithmetic to Proof: Creating Mathematicians in the Elementary School Classroom".

Dr. Kasman is the winner of the 2017 NES/MAA Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching and the 2016 winner of the Distinguished Teaching Award at Salem State University. She earned her Ph.D. in geometric group theory at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and her current scholarship is focused on teaching and working with pre-service and in-service elementary and middle school teachers. Reva is a co-author of But Why Does It Work?: Mathematical Argument in the Elementary Classroom with Susan Jo Russell, Deborah Schifter, Virginia Bastable, and Traci Higgins, and she is a co-author of a chapter (Guided Discovery in a Discrete Mathematics Course for Middle School Teachers) in the Mathematical Association of America's Resources for Preparing Middle School Mathematics Teachers (Cheryl Beaver, Laurie Burton, Maria Fung, and Klay Kruczek, Editors) with Mary Flahive. Reva has been a summer faculty member at Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics (BEAM) since 2014 and a co-director of the Career Mentoring for Women workshop (CaMeW).

Abstract:  Traditional mathematics learning tends to begin with the presentation of a polished result which is then applied to carefully chosen illustrative examples. But this format hides the true nature of a mathematician’s work, which is creative, exploratory, messy, and meandering. Long before mathematicians prove a useful theorem, they play with examples, cultivate their intuition, and make a lot of false starts in their search for something that is plausibly true.

How does the mathematical experience change for elementary students when they function as a community of mathematicians? In this talk I will share work from a project which brings mathematical argument about the four arithmetic operations into 2nd-5th grade classrooms. We will explore what it means for young students (and their teachers) to engage in the earliest stages of creating conjectures, searching for evidence and counterexamples, and ultimately supporting their claims with representation-based proofs.
 

Dinner Meeting Program                     Lecture Program
 

We thank Sodexho, the Office of the Vice President of Academic Affairs, Pearson Education, and Cengage Learning for their support of the 2018 NES/MAA Dinner Meeting in Memory of Kenneth J. Preskenis.

2018 Preskenis Dinner Collage

 

This site was created and is maintained by Sarah L. Mabrouk.  Click to send email to Sarah Mabrouk about the home page for the Preskenis Dinner site.
This site was created and is maintained by Sarah L. Mabrouk, Mathematics Department, Framingham State University.  If you notice any broken hyperlinks, please feel free to send email.