From Duck to Lion

January 3, 2005

This morning when I dropped my daughter Sonia off at the Fermilab Children's Center I found out that she is now a lion instead of a duck--which means that she has graduated one room to the next at the Center, and has a new teacher.  It's funny how central these identities are to the kids--last November when I went to vote the election officials asked my 7 year old if he was going to vote and he said no, since he wasn't 18 yet.  Sonia immediately piped up with "yeah, and next year I can go on the stagecoach [a big jungle gym] because I'll be a lion, and now I'm a duck". 

But while the Children's Center is a big part of "life at the lab", because the teachers are responsible for kids instead of beamlines or detectors, they end up missing out on some of the things that bring the lab together.  Can you imagine bringing 10 three-year-olds to an office holiday party?  Or worse, leaving them to fend for themselves while you went?   

Last year a bunch of us on MINOS gave tours (described here) of "our brand new beamline" since it's a really cool space to explore (you end up about 300 feet underground!), and once the experiment starts running it will be inaccessible.  The tours were offered to Fermilab employees and users, and the spaces filled up immediately.  I was one of the tour guides and realized once the schedules were set that the only way the Children's center teachers could go would be if they could get their own special tour while the kids were napping.  Luckily they found enough subs during naptime and in two shifts, most of the teachers at the center took the tour.  This means they devoted about 2 hours to walking through the beamline and learning all about neutrinos and the beamline produces them, and how MINOS sees them in a detector. 

I helped give both tours, and it felt like a complete turning of the tables.  Here were the women I had trusted with my kids and from whom I have been asking for advice for the past 7 years, and they were asking me all about something they knew as little about as I knew about raising kids 7 years ago.  They finally saw what I was doing all that time they were busy teaching my kids to walk, toilet training them, and getting them to play nice with others. 

I'll never forget the first time I stopped by with my 6-week old son to see what the Children's Center was like.  I was in the infant room and actually saw a child's very first steps.  Pam (the teacher) was so excited to get him to walk that she immediately called the baby's mother to tell her the great news.  I left the room nearly in tears fearing I would not see my own kid's first steps.  By the time he did start walking, about a year later, I was in fact out of the room, but I was just so happy to hear about it that it didn't occur to me to be sad

I could write many more examples about how having such great teachers makes it much easier to be a physicist and a mom at the same time, but I should probably stop and rest up for when the lion next roars. 

Comments

[Dave Harding]

Thanks for giving the Children's Center some well-deserved praise. They made a huge difference in my life twenty years ago, or so, while my children were at that stage, and I think that they made a huge difference in the children's lives as well.

And I like your analogy between the start-up of a beamline and the birth of a child.