Professional Organizations

Modern teachers have a chance to meet up with people of their field. Science teachers, like me, join organizations for various reasons.  One organization is the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA).  There are groups for special areas.  The American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT)   has multiple chapters throughout the region and plan occasional conferences.   There is one more physics association that meets monthly unless there is an AAPT meeting for that month. This group is mainly restricted to the state of Illinois known as the Illinois State Physics Project. Here is a snipet from the website:
ISPP is a loose organization of High School, College, and University Physics Teachers in the Chicago Area who meet once a month , except November, July and August, at host schools to discuss teaching methods, lecture and lab demonstrations, and teaching techniques. We emphasize the use of phenomena to engage the student, so the presentations usually involve activities.

I went to a meeting last thursday at Chicago State.  High School and College teachers met to do sort of a "show and tell" of physics experiments they introduced to their class that challenged everyday phenomena. Since I had to take my mentor to a student teacher meeting prior to the ISPP meeting (that was on the same campus) we showed up very early.  I had time to grab some equipment I left at Chicago State the day before that I used to show my supervisors in one my class earlier that week.  Walking around with this, everyone assumed I was going to show THEM something.  I wasn't going to show them whatsoever.  As the ISPP meeting started my mentor mentioned to me that he signed me up to perform a demo with what I had. "The mystery tube" as he had everyone calling it.

There was a reason I didn't want to show this off.  One, I was sure they had seen this already, and two, majority of the people have lots of experience with teaching physics or other general sciences.  I was more nervous in front of these people than I would be with my actual students!  The host assured me that the audience is not as vicious as I would expect.  I have heard this before.  The nicest audience, that was used to describe Science Seminar when I was an undergrad.  A science colloquium presented by the students for the students, and the profs would supervise.  It was my turn to show off what I had with me,  I can feel my heart beat in my stomach.  I like to have attention, but not professional, mature, attention.  These are people I look up to, and now I went before them...

My, name is Jeremiah Campion, you can call me "the young Jerry"  no offense (as I point to Gerry Leitz who was one of the founders of this organization sitting in front of me).  I have been teaching for negative point five ( -.5 ) years but once I am done with student teaching over at Bogan High School, I can officially walk to any school and tell them I have zero years experience.

that got me to settle my nerves and I was able to show them the demo I used with my students.  I told them who I got the idea from and that I was surprised no one had seen it before.  It was a cardboard tubes with strings tied to one another so that if you pull on one end from any side, a string from the loose end gets pulled in, and so on.  The point of showing the student was to help them understand Scientific theory, in that even though you cant see it, doesn't mean we don't have an idea of what it looks like or how it works (like an atom), until we can find ways to further our investigation.  I showed them how it looked on the inside, but by doing this, we are "playing god".  The crowd enjoyed what I had brought forth to them as I always enjoy what they want to show everyone else.  This is not going to be the only time I would present something, I've always wanted to actually, but not until after I had a few years of teaching under my belt, and my own bag full of tricks that I would try to find worthwhile to show off.  I'll get there eventually.