Dr. Jeneva Moseley, assistant professor of mathematics at Lee University, presented at the regional meeting of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics in Louisville, Ky.
The title of her presentation was “Hands-on Conics,” during which Dr. Moseley demonstrated hands-on approaches to teaching high school students on the topic of conic sections.
"The hands-on activities involved cheese, wax paper, push pins, clothes line, cardboard, and Wikki Stix," said Dr. Moseley. “The purpose of this workshop was to demonstrate various hands-on approaches that facilitate connections with conics. We tried to challenge teachers to take it even further and ask students to dig deeper for more connections."
Dr. Moseley presented the activities and then led a discussion on how the activities related to the concepts and the connections between definitions and hands-on approaches to teaching. There were 100 participants in attendance.
“Teachers are finding more responsibility for promoting connections, like connections from the distance formula to the formula of a parabola, two formulas that may have seemed unrelated in the past,” said Dr. Moseley.
Dr. Moseley began teaching at Lee in August of 2013. She received her PhD in theory and practice in teacher education with a concentration in mathematics education from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She graduated from Lee in 2001 with a triple major in mathematics, mathematics education, and English education.
Dr. Moseley was assisted by co-presenter Amanda Jones, who joined Lee’s faculty in August of 2013 as a lecturer in mathematics. Jones is a 2009 graduate of Lee and recipient of the Mathematics Education Award. Prior to teaching at Lee, she taught algebra and geometry at Cleveland High School for two years and was a graduate teaching assistant in calculus while at Clemson University.