Dr Susan Picker lives and works in New York City, where she is a Secondary Mathematics Specialist with the New York City Department of Education. Before that she coordinated Middle and High School Mathematics Initiatives for New York’s Community School District 2. She holds an MA from Columbia University Teachers College.
In 1990 she attended Rutgers University’s summer Leadership Program in Discrete Mathematics funded by the National Science Foundation, and soon began working as a lead teacher in the program. In 1996, having completed a small research project at Pace University in New York, on the effects of studying discrete mathematics on off-track high school students’ attitudes, she decided she wanted to do further research.
Susan came to the Centre for Teaching Mathematics to be a research student in 1997 because of the strong record they have in researching learner attitudes and discrete/decision mathematics, both of which she hoped to investigate further. She had been using the Spode Group’s The Decision Maths Pack by John Berry et al, with her students in New York for a number of years, but there was little similar material in the States at that time. "I felt a philosophical agreement with John Berry and colleagues at the Centre that I did not feel then at universities in New York, " she said.
Her project came to be an investigation of the images lower secondary pupils’ hold of mathematicians and mathematics, which included an intervention utilising discrete mathematics and an intervention in which pupils met directly with mathematicians.
Susan was awarded her PhD in November 2000 and continues her affiliation with the CTM as a research associate.

Publications

November, 2006: Invited Keynote Speaker: Students’ Stereotypes of Mathematicians, Colloquium 1—New York University Best Practices Colloquia, Steinhardt School of Education, New York City

October 2006: Invited Speaker: The Teacher Academy at York College, City University of New York: "Mathematics' Image Problem: The Elephant in the (Class) Room".

Picker, S. H. (in press) Chvátal’s Art Gallery Theorem! Mathematics in School.

Picker, S.H. (2005). Numb3rs: An Answer to Mathematics’ ‘Image Problem’? IOWME Newsletter, 19(3), 21-26.

Picker, S.H. (2005). Mathematical Reasoning Using Bipartite Graphs and Graph Colouring. Mathematics in School, 34(1).

susan.picker@att.net