Curtis began his teaching career as an assistant faculty member at Bowling Green State University (Ohio), was a guest lecturer at Michigan State University, and currently teaches at Loyola Marymout University in Los Angeles. At each university he has taught a capstone mathematics course. His SoTL research described below refers to the version of the course he taught at Michigan State University in 2000-2001.

The capstone course was the final mathematics course in the major. It addresses disparate mathematical topics. At Michigan State, all seniors in mathematics who planned to become high school teachers took the course to fulfill the capstone requirement of the mathematics major. Of the fourteen students enrolled in his capstone course, thirteen expected to be secondary mathematics teachers.

From Curtis felt that his particular teaching challenge was to engage students in studying mathematics as scholars. "Unengaged students do not learn to make connections, as they see little value in it. Students with no intention to study advanced, authentic mathematics may have little interest in this idea of a capstone course."

Curtis had observed that students in these capstone courses were normally above average, but few of them understood what mathematics was. They had had no experience doing it in previous courses, and thus they never became fully engaged in studying mathematics. Curtis felt that students treated work in the course as tedious or a set of hoops to jump through instead of as a scholarly pursuit.

When Curtis arrived at Michigan State to teach the capstone course, he decided to assign semester-long, open-ended mathematical research projects in an attempt to engage students in mathematics scholarship.