Ed Migliore

University of California, Santa Cruz

Ed Migliore has no formal training in education. He was thrust into the field the same way most graduate students are, by assuming the duties of a teaching assistant. After several years in that role, he was given a California Teaching Fellowship for two years. Each year, he worked with a different class of students in a local elementary school, introducing them to “topics not traditionally covered in the curriculum.” During these two years, Ed developed a collection of activity-based lessons involving problem-solving in probability, combinatorics, set theory, symmetries, and group theory. One year, the teacher split the class by performance and he worked with the same small group of students in the library for a week. He discovered that the lowest quartile consistently had the least difficulty and the highest level of interest in these activities.

Ed received his Ph.D. in mathematics from UCSC in 1982 and taught at Monterey Peninsula College for 32 years. From 1985 until 1995, Ed was an Instructor and Co-Director for the Monterey Bay Area Mathematics Project, where the team conducted three- to four-week summer workshops for K-12 teachers. He is now retired from MPC and continues to lecture at UCSC.