Final Post from PME-NA

The North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, also known as PME-NA (#OleMissAtPME) wrapped up today.  I presented my poster Teaching Mathematics as Agape: Articulating an ideal relationship between students and mathematics.  I have never presented a poster during a conference before.  It is a weird experience because basically you are giving a talk to a person who walks by but you don’t know how long the talk is going to last.  That person could leave at any minute, thus you want to make sure that you position the importance of your work appropriately to capture and maintain the interest of those that wander by.  My goal in presenting the poster was to gather feedback about how to improve the study for future implementation.  Mission accomplished.  I received both theoretical and methodological feedback that will be very useful in moving forward.  Most importantly I received encouragement.  People could see the importance of this work and were intrigued by the ideas that were presented within it.

Traveling away from a PME-NA conference is a unique experience.  The scholars that you listen to during plenary talks are the same people who are working their way through the security checkpoints at the airport.  I saw Patricio Herbst, an important scholar at the University of Michigan, in line for lunch at the airport.  He waved me down  to tell me about another researcher’s work that connected to what I had presented in my poster.  Pretty cool.