Portland, OR, the place of the 2010 AAPT Summer Meeting (July 17-21, 2010)
American Association of Physics Teachers has played a significant role in my professional and personal life for over a decade. I became a member of the TX section of the AAPT while being a graduate student at the University of TX (1999). I was invited to come to the section meetings and often brought my kids there (who always enjoyed the science demos and the fun stuff). Then I moved to NJ and became a member of NJ section, then after moving to Canada I became a member of BC and ON sections. In every place, I enjoyed tremendous support in physics teaching thanks to the local and national AAPT members. However, if you to ask me what is the main reason I am so actively involved in the organization, my one-sentence answer would be – because of the amazing opportunity to meet wonderful people. I love physics teaching and I love creative, passionate, hard working physics teachers who have lots of talents and often a great sense of humour – and AAPT has lots of them. You will be amazed how many talented people will attend the national meetings. This is so inspirational and it gives me lots of positive energy and ideas. I can say exactly the same about our local BCAPT section. By being involved you will not only have a chance to give back to the physics teaching community, but you will get a lot of satisfaction out of it. Just to name a few people from our local BCAPT section you would love to get to know right away – Peter Hopkinson (a real demo super hero), Leigh Palmer (whose knowledge of physics and and the history of physics makes it a real pleasure to talk to him), Philip Freeman (our incoming BCAPT president) – who has done amazing work at TRIUMF and created materials for Physics Teachers, Sarah Johnson who was one of the designers and the instructors of the state of the art studio physics teaching labs at Simon Fraser University, Dan Phelps (our past president) with his extensive knowledge of physics teaching methods using modeling and data collection and analysis, and many-many others who I do not have space to mention here.
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