I was talking about last week's high school visit with Kevin McFarland, a very good friend of mine who (among other things) teaches physics at the University of Rochester and has visited lots of high school classrooms over the years. Kevin assured me that this trip was even more unusual than I had appreciated--the fact that students could fill each period with questions for me was the sign of a lot of prep time for them and their teacher, and the sign of a very open-minded and self-assured group.
Kevin asked me if I would be interested in speaking at PARTICLE DAY, a big annual conference for high school students and teachers which is part of anoutreach program he directs called PARTICLE (Physicists and Rochester Teachers Inventing Classroom Experiments ). With all the excitement of just the past 3 months of starting up this new beamline I certainly have a good story to tell these students, if I can only figure out the best way to tell it!
It's funny, because last year's PARTICLE DAY talk (given by Sam Zeller, pictured at left) covered some of the same material I tried to explain this week during my high school visit, and I see I have a long way to go as far as graphical presentations! I hear with the animation in the original talk it's even better than the link shows.
After a few email conversations with both him and Sam I'm finding out that visiting high schools (and talking to high school students in lots of settings) is actually something responsible physicists do more than just once every 20 years. There are a few cool talks given at actual high schools by people in the PARTICLE probram at this link. Given how much fun I had last Wednesday, I can certainly see why these folks go! The strange thing is that I didn't realize all of this much much earlier.
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