Education: PhD in economics, Stanford University
Professional Experience: Senior economist at International Monetary Fund, Senior advisor at UNICEF New York Headquarters, Math Kangaroo USA curriculum development expert, Founder of Westchester Math Kangaroo League.
Instructor Approach: problem solving with math kangaroo is a self discovery process – students are encouraged to always ask themselves 3 questions: 1) How may I get started and if a particular path didn’t work out, what else might I try? 2) Now that I solved it, is there a better, more elegant way? And 3) How can I apply the insights gained from solving this problem to other related problems including from higher grade levels? For the initial step of this self discovery, I use props and hands-on experiments whenever possible, like having the students cut out and draw on 2D nets using graphing paper to build and manipulate 3D cubes.