Dr. Andrew Grossfield, professor in Vaughn’s arts and sciences department has been selected to hold a faculty workshop at the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Mid-Atlantic fall meeting at Swarthmore College in Pa on Friday, November 14. The workshop, “An Honest Approach to Helping High School Students Understand Calculus,” will cover basic algebraic ideas, researching the curves of pre-calculus and differential calculus.

The ASEE meeting, hosted by the engineering department at Swarthmore will feature refereed papers, workshops, keynote speakers, discussions related to engineering education and student poster sessions with prizes to the top contenders.

As previously noted in the title, the goal of Grossfield’s workshop is to help high school teachers make calculus easier for their students to understand by reviewing well-known facts about the discipline in a newly organized and visual way. Grossfield worked as an engineer before entering the applied math doctoral program at the University of Arizona where he sought to understand the theorems rather than memorizing them. His learnings will be covered during the workshop.

Grossfield studied continuum mechanics under L.M. Milne Thomson, CBE at the University of Arizona, is licensed as a PE in New York State and has been teaching mathematics and electronics for over 40 years at Vaughn College. He is past chair of the ASEE Mid-Atlantic Section and has been granted the ASEE 2010 Math Division Distinguished Educator Award.