The CSUF senior turned to her instructor on the airplane.
“Oh my gosh,” Carolynn Cao said to Alison Marzocchi, an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics and principal investigator of Project META: Mathematics Equity through Teaching Actively.
“This all happened because of our icebreaker question exercise in class!”
Two years ago, Cao, who graduates this May with an undergraduate degree in math, told Marzocchi during the exercise in her Math 380 History of Mathematics course that taking a flight was on her bucket list. Growing up in a family of eight in Santa Ana, Cao had never flown.
“I have a soft spot for students who tell me they’ve never been on an airplane,” Marzocchi said. “I didn’t travel too much as a kid, but now that I’ve had many opportunities to travel as a professor, I see how beneficial the experience is. Through travel experiences, I’ve learned and changed so much as a person.
“I told Carolynn that I would do everything in my power to get her on her first flight.”
Marzocchi delivered, taking Cao and three other math majors to a conference in New Orleans in early February of this year.
Presented research
There, Cao and fellow students Michael Filice, Cedar Hofstetter and Olga Luna Flores presented work they have conducted as student researchers at a gathering of the Association of Mathematics Teachers Educators, the largest professional organization devoted to the improvement of mathematics teacher education.
Cao and the other students, as well as Marzocchi, detailed the Teaching Equity-minded and Active Mathematics tool used in CSUF’s math department.
TEAM, employed last year after the math department won a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation, is designed to reduce long-standing equity gaps across racial/ethnic and gender lines in the STEM fields of science, technology engineering and mathematics.
Key to the TEAM approach is having students actively working on math problems in class…
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