Report on ISAAPT meeting

Last weekend at the ISAAPT meeting:

*Gabe Caceres won the Student Research Symposium Award for the best student research presentation of the year. Congratulations, Gabe! It was a good talk - just gets better everytime I see it. Some guy in the audience (one of the judges, I think) unsuccessfully tried to stump him with a tough question, but Gabe came through FTW. Yay!

*Found out that SIUE is still accepting applications for grad school, so if you are a senior interested in grad school, you might look into it. They offer masters degrees in physcics and have people working in the fields of optics, physics education, and biophysics.

*Heard some other good talks, including one on ultracold temps and one on changing a physics problem while someone is working on it and not having them notice :-p.

*In another talk, the speaker said, "Good students use subscripts" - I ask you: which is cause, which effect? Are the "good" students just more experienced students, who have seen their instructors use subscripts and copy that? Do the poorer students not understand the problem well enough to even label quantities with subscripts? Does subscript use make you a better student or better able to solve problems?

*Got some new demo ideas, including demos that help visualize conservation of energy and circular polarization. Also picked up a new way to review for exams - watch out, I might use it on you.

*One demo presented showed how to measure the speed of light with sticks of butter in a microwave. All I could think of was, "Marshmallows taste better!"

According to those at this conference (who ought to know), there is a real need for physics teachers. If you have considered a career in teaching physics, check out this site.