I have enjoyed my internship experience this summer.  Tom is a really wonderful person and was a lot of fun to work with these past few weeks.  On a typical day at SAMSI I would work on my curriculum product and if I had a meeting scheduled with Tom it would be about 2 hours long.  The meetings were always really helpful because we’d work through physics or he’d teach me about the code that we were going to use.  One of the most useful moments working with Tom was when he was looking over one of my rough drafts and it occurred to me that I was missing the forest for the trees on my project.  I was so focused on having my students create a model of a bouncing ball that I forgot that it was just that: a model.  The point of the project was to have students model collisions.  Not JUST a bouncing ball colliding with the ground.  The bouncing ball itself was a model for any objects that interact together.  I forgot that at some point and that’s why I felt like it was so useful to have working meetings with my mentor.  If I had just taken his suggestions at the beginning of the summer and didn’t have another meeting with him, my project would definitely not be anything like it could be!  Tom really helped me see the point of high school physics.  Yes, most problems are just people pushing or pulling boxes around, but if that’s all the students see then we aren’t teaching physics correctly.  Students need to see those simple examples as models for much more complicated interactions.  Students need to be confident that they can understand those complicated interactions, because in the end, they’re just as simple as a bouncing ball. (I’ll be reflecting more on this idea at the end of the week!)

The most interesting moment I have had in my internship has been getting to participate in the computational neuroscience workshop that SAMSI was hosting. This was really the only time that I visited a new site beyond my office. I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect from it, but Tom was in charge of organizing it so I wanted to go! It turns out that computational neuroscience is really difficult, who would have thought? But really, I had a fantastic time. The first day was very math heavy and statistics based. It wasn’t until the morning of the second day that I had that “a-ha” moment! One of the speakers was discussing Neural Spike Train Analysis and he approached it from a biophysical perspective instead of statistical like the day before. He broke down the neurons into a very simplistic physics model: a simple circuit. I teach simple circuits in my physics class so I felt right at home. I even spoke with him afterwards about using his slides to teach my AP Physics students a little about the connections between biology and physics. It doesn’t quite fit into that curriculum, but I can guarantee that these kids are going to see how cool it all is. I had never been so interested in biology before in my life. I know that I would not have been afforded this opportunity if it were not for Kenan Fellows and SAMSI.

Throughout the internship I felt like the biggest challenge for me was staying focused. Because I was at a desk most of the time working on my curriculum product I was worried that I would burn out quickly. I made sure to interact with the other people working at SAMSI, but all in all I only really worked with Tom. My big takeaway from this experience is that I am ready to push myself to be a better teacher. That sounds extremely cliche and generic, but it is true. Before working with Tom, I didn’t always see how easy it was to make connections in the physics classroom. Sure I connected my content to real world applications, but Tom has shown me how to take it a step further and really make my content and connections worthwhile.