In my dissertation, I surveyed middle school students and asked them about their ideas of steepness. Steepness apears in many aspects of our everyday lives - for example, hills, roofs, stairs have steepnesses that we might want to take into consideration. Being able to use proportional reasoning to measure the slopes of inclines, as well as use angle measurements to describe steepness, are important skills to develop in the middle grades.

In this on-ice dance, my body (arms, legs, torso) and the baseball bat vary in their steepnesses relative to the ice: horizontal, all sorts of degrees, and vertical. While completing my dissertation in mathematics education, I also used mathematics to help strategize for my intercollegiate skating team to win the 2009 & 2010 US Figure Skating Intercollegiate National Championships, hence the medium of ice.

The song in this dance, regarding keeping one's eyes on the ball in the game of baseball, is a metaphor for a graduate student's keeping herself focused on completing the dissertation.