My educational research investigates the teaching and learning of K-8 (elementary and middle grades) mathematics, the analysis of students' mathematical thinking, and teachers' abilities and dispositions to do so. I direct UTA's graduate program in K-8 mathematics education (which I developed in partnership with local school districts), with courses offered under the auspices of the math department which then plug into the M.Ed. degree in Curriculum and Instruction. In the College of Education I teach math methods courses for prospective middle grades (EDML 4372) and elementary bilingual (BEEP 4311) teachers, and in the math department I developed a sequence of small-group problem-solving courses, Math 1330, Math 1331, and Math 1332, for pre-service teachers.
In my occasional leisure time, I also write novels (anybody know a good publisher? :) and poetry, draw a little, do genealogy research, and a little Scottish Country Dancing.
As an undergraduate, I double-majored in electrical engineering and math at Duke. During summers, I worked in the speech research lab at Texas Instruments, through 1994. In January 1990 I entered EE graduate school at Georgia Tech in Atlanta; in August of that year I moved (with my advisor) to Tech's then-brand-new campus in Metz, France, an hour south of Luxembourg in Alsace-Lorraine. While finishing up my M.S.E.E. at Georgia Tech Lorraine I met some distant cousins who lived nearby, and fell in love with the area. With the possible exception of Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorraine gets little attention from tourists, but it has one of the richest regional cultures in the country, and the people are remarkably friendly, especially given what they've endured every time a war has ravaged Europe (they're the only pass through the mountains to western Europe). I spent a year in Santa Fe, New Mexico, teaching math and physics at a boarding school for Native Americans, before working on my doctorate in Wisconsin.