Speakers Friday night included:
Sarah Pusey (Harriton HS) questions about lab reports
Harry Woodcock (Philadelphia University) Galilean transformations
Jeff Wetherhold (Parkland High School) stop-motion video films
Y. K. Ha (Temple University) a summary of Black Holes
Barry Feierman (Westtown School) resonance in a parallel LC circuit
Ollie Perry (Shawnee HS) a vector navigation game
Tom Gordon (retired, Bronx HS) angular momentum demonstration
Fran Poodry (West Chester, East) sound demonstrations with resonance tubes
Harriet Slogoff (Univ Penn) Archimedes' principle demonstration
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| Harry Woodcock | Y. K. Ha |
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| Jeff Wetherhold | |
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| Ollie Perry | Tom Gordon |
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| Fran Poodry | Harriet Slogoff |
Our Saturday meeting began with a breakfast and then featured three invited speakers for the morning session.
| Our first speaker, Ariel Michelman-Rubeiro of Boston University, spoke about the possibilities of increasing the participation of women in physics. She gave the audience a set of goals and challenges in order to make physics classrooms more "female friendly" speaking from her personal experience in high school, college, and graduate school, as well as information from research into this area. The audience was very attentive and we hope to do a better job of encouraging women in science. Liz Chesick, one of our section's seasoned teachers, will be giving a paper at the summer national Syracuse meeting on "single gender physics classrooms". |  |
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Our next speaker was Bill Berner, University of Pennsylvania, who gave a talk about the appearance of the exponential function in introductory physics. Bill was a high school teacher for a number of years before joining the University of Pennsylvaniašs physics department. He gave many examples of the way the exponential function appears in many common situations and challenged us to figure out a way to make exponential growth (and decay) a more familiar phenomena in our physics classes. |
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Our third speaker was Paul Steinhardt, Princeton University, who spoke about the "Tale of Two Universes". Paul went into depth about what we know about cosmology and why we know it (or think we know it). He gave us much to think about concerning the origin of the universe as well as its fate, including evidence for a "cyclic model" universe. |
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After lunch we had our business meeting and elected section officers for the year. Our new President will be Harriet Slogoff (University of Pennsylvania) and Vice-President Fran Poodry (West Chester East HS). Barry Feierman will continue as Section Representative for two more years.
Old President (Bob Schwartz) and new President and Vice-President.
We reelected our Corresponding Secretary, Chet Zach (retired) and Treasurer John Patane (retired). We then appointed members-at-large from various geographical parts of the seven-county region including:
Liz Chesick - Delaware and Montgomery counties private schools
Bob Schwartz - Delaware and Montgomery counties public schools
Chet Zach - north Philadelphia area
Pat Callahan - Upper Bucks and north
Greg Byrd and Barry Feierman - Chester County
Sardari Khanna - Lancaster and York counties
Craig Halpern - Lower Bucks county
Sister Janice Shaw - Catholic Schools
John Patane - south Philadelphia area
Jeff Wetherhold - Lehigh county
The goal for these regional members-at-large is to reach out to new physics teachers as well as to encourage existing seasoned teachers at both the high school and the college/university to take a more active role in the section business. We now offer Pennsylvania Act 48 credit for our workshops and annual meetings.
The afternoon talks featured two professors from St. Joseph's University, our host. Doug Kurtze spoke about global climate and ocean circulation suggesting some new ways to view global climate, and Piotr Habdas spoke about the nature of squishy solids (or are they mushy liquids) giving many fascinating examples of the odd way some solids behave.
Doug Kurtze and Piotr Habdas
We adjurned without deciding on the location or date of the annual Fall Demo Night in October. We are also looking forward to continued good relations with our neighboring Central Pennsylvania and New Jersey sections.
Submitted by Barry Feierman
Section Representative, SEPA
Westtown School