Thanks for promoting outreach to high schools. I visited high schools and enjoyed the experience enough that I took a part time job as a high school teacher. I’ve got a single class of 31 students, all of whom have taken a year of physics previously. It is great fun, and lots of work.

In addition to teaching my class, I spend much of my time answering questions from other teachers and students outside of my class, and I occasionally give presentations to other classes. Every semester I go to all of the Geo-Space classes and give a lecture on the expanding universe. Geo-Space is the course for students who need a science course to graduate. They have minimal math skills, and very limited science background, but they are always engaged and ask great questions. Don’t think that you need to be talking to the best students if you go to visit a high school, just use lots of pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope and take plenty of time explaining. I spent three days teaching group theory and particle physics in an advanced math class (after the teacher asked me “Is group theory useful for anything?”). I even gave a talk to our Theory of Knowledge classes who were doing a unit on perception. I presented the evidence for dark matter, an example of perception at the frontiers of physics.

I’d really like to see high school teaching become a viable career path for more Ph.D.s but there are some serious obstacles. Foremost is money. I am making “in the high four figures,” as I like to put it. Next year I will have two classes, so I will make almost exactly what I was making as a graduate student ten years ago. Clearly underfunding of education is a serious problem generally that should be fixed in a comprehensive way. However, as scientists interested in outreach I think we should be looking at ways to fund involvement of scientists in primary and secondary education beyond the occasional drop in appearance. I would love to hear some ideas on this.

The second big challenge is isolation from the research community. My background is in string theory and it had been my hope that working only part time in the school would allow me to dedicate time to reconnecting with the field. However, it is a challenge. I live right by Colorado State University, but they don’t do string theory. (I’ve considered switching fields to something that they do.) The University of Colorado is just over an hour away and I should get down there more often for conversations. It seems that the internet should be a great tool for getting connected, but I haven’t figured out how to make that happen yet. I’d be very interested in suggestions on this topic as well.

Many Ph.D.s leave science for other fields and disconnect from the subject they love. I feel very lucky to have found a career where I can talk about physics everyday with interested and intelligent people. I hope I can figure out how to sustain it and make this an opportunity for more scientists. Science education would benefit tremendously.

I doubt our teacher will let us (we have an optics unit to do), but it might be a neat idea. Do you know anyone in the Ottawa/Gatineau area who might think of doing it?

So I guess what I’m really saying is that I’m jealous of those seniors you talked to.

I actually do mean an infinite plane. If one takes the covering space of flat geometry – the infinite plane – and mods out by a freely-acting subgroup of the isometries (translations in this case), then one will obtain a finite torus.

OK, you’ve blown past my limited knowledge of topology, so I’ll take your word for that . Though I’d suggest that, pedagogically, it’s easier to explain finite plane -> torus examples, as in the case of mapping opposite edges of a square onto each other the way video games sometimes do (Asteroids being a classic example).

I actually do mean an infinite plane. If one takes the covering space of flat geometry – the infinite plane – and mods out by a freely-acting subgroup of the isometries (translations in this case), then one will obtain a finite torus.

Yes, I remember those days (having once substituted for my advisor for a day in teaching an Astronomy 100 class, and discussing just those wrong answers)…

One can construct these in analogous ways to making a torus from an infinite flat plane …

I think you mean a finite flat plane, yes?

Two examples:
– Our Cosmic Connections project involved a number of graduate students (we even paid them!)
-When I did this same visit to the high school last year I took two of my graduate students along and we answered questions together. This year our schedules didn’t quite allow this but I’ll be taking them next year.

Hope to see you in the Fall.