Reflections of QuarkNet Teachers and Staff

QuarkNet has been a wonderful part of my physics-teaching life for the past nine years. During the summer of 2000, after my 1999 research summer with Ulrich Heintz at Boston University, we conducted our three-week particle physics workshop spread over venues at BU, Northeastern University, where Darien Wood was the mentor, and Roxbury Latin School, where I teach. The photo attached shows that workshop group, Roxbury Latin. We had so many people sign up that summer that we had to request extra funding from QuarkNet. We have had summer workshops and school-year meetings every year since then. A few years ago, Ela Barberis joined her husband, Darien, in mentoring our group. She helped several of us become acquainted with the Fermilab cosmic ray detectors and obtain them for use in our schools. Recently Darien was elected to be spokesperson for the DØ Group at Fermilab, and he arranged for George Alverson at Northeastern to become a mentor to our group during his absence. George was a major contributor to the success of our Boston Particle Physics Masterclass held at Northeastern this past March.

In 2002 the success of our Boston QuarkNet group prompted Fred Cooper of NSF to talk with us, initiating an effort he had in mind to affiliate particle physics theorists with high school teachers for classroom visits and conversations between the theorists, teachers and students. The result of that conversation was Physics TheoryNet. Most of the high school teachers in that group were recruited from our Boston QuarkNet pool. That program continues prosperously today. As a result, my students have had the benefit of visits from and conversations with several theorists.

Over the years I have had the benefit of participating in several QuarkNet activities including the Fermilab "Boot Camp" in particle data analysis in 2004, the Public Outreach program at the ILC Planning Conference at Snowmass, Colorado, in 2005, and the LHC Fellows program at Fermilab in 2007. All these have contributed to my ability to answer students' questions and develop problem and lab exercises related to particle physics for use in my classes, especially my Advanced Topics in Physics and Mathematics classes. In the Advanced Topics class we spend about a quarter of the school year investigating particle physics from the discovery of radioactivity to the construction of the LHC. It has been a pleasure to see the excitement of students in that class as they grapple with determining the mass and mean lifetime of the sigma minus particle, the mass and strangeness of the omega minus particle, the mass of the top quark, and the decay channel percentages of the Z boson - all derived from real data. Several students from that course have gone on to college and have careers in science and technology.

As you can tell, QuarkNet has had a significant influence on my teaching career.