Meeting Notes and Next Meeting

Tucson-Area Physics Teachers,

We has a fantastic meeting Saturday! Thanks to all who attended. 

Many, many thanks to our wonderful and gracious speaker, Dr. Brenda Frye. She was mesmerizing, and we not only learned a lot, but were basically entranced by the subject and the presentation.  Dr. Frye is an astronomer at Steward Observatory and an Assistant Professor in the Astronomy Department. Her enthusiasm for her research and for science in general is infectious! 

Dr. Frye talked about gravitational lensing and how she and others have used it to map dark matter. There were also some wonderful stories about the difficulty of doing science, for example, during WWI when communication between Germany and England was forbidden, and Einstein was in Germany and Eddington was in England. Some other threads concerned Vera Rubin, the first to notice rotation curves that led to the idea of dark matter - what an admirable scientist she was! Also Dr. Frye discussed some future Citizen Science possibilities. She ended her talk with the question, what is a galaxy? Her answer basically exploded everyone’s mind. There are some very deep mysteries, and a big reason is the presence of dark matter. She made the point that we know less about dark matter now than we did 10 years ago. It was fascinating!

Also, there was an amazing breakfast, sponsored by the U of A Physics Department and planned by J.D. Thanks to both!  We also had an attendee from Phoenix: Jim Ward, who has served for the last few years as the President of the Arizona section of AAPT. AzAAPT had a great meeting in Phoenix last week, Sept 30th. The AzAAPT's next meeting (next April) is planned for Bearizona, near Flagstaff. I am attaching Jim's report from the September meeting, in case you want details. It was a really good all-day meeting - lots of great information, and I'd love it if more Tucson teachers got involved.

Our next TAPT meeting is November 11^th; it is tentatively scheduled to be at Pima Community College West Campus. We’ll have a free-for-all discussion about scheduling your class: how to cover everything you need to cover, how to fit in all the subjects, how deep to go, when to do lab and when to go deeper, how to know if your students know enough for you to move on. It will be relevant to AP as well as regular physics and college physics. Helen Reynolds, TAPT member and British physics teacher extraordinaire, will be leading the discussion, but I think it will be a discussion among everyone. Helen has several books in publication, and she will be telling us about one in particular that she uses for a one-year curriculum. Recert hours are available. More info to follow.

I hope your year is going great! Thanks for participating in TAPT - I hope it's helpful and enriching. I hope to see everyone at the next meeting. Please email me if you have any questions.

Best,