I worked with a single mentor at SAMSI during my Kenan Fellowship. There were multiple other people that I interacted with, but my project experience was just with Dr. Witelski. As I have blogged about before, during one of our meetings together Dr. Witelski helped me discover what our project was truly about. It wasn’t simply that we were looking at a model of a bouncing ball, but what that model could ultimately represent in a larger picture. That was extremely helpful for me since physics can so often get stuck in the “pushing a box up a ramp” types of examples that show up in every unit in every class. I want my students to see real world examples and how those smaller, more basic versions can help add to their understanding of how the world works.

Dr. Witelski is an applied mathematics professor at Duke so he wasn’t at SAMSI every day. We planned days to meet and would work together. He would walk me through ideas and help explain the computer programming he did for the project. When he wasn’t at SAMSI I worked by myself. I spent time going through tutorials for Octave because computer programming does not come naturally to me. It is actually very difficult. Working with Dr. Witelski was very helpful in terms of my growth as an educator in physics. I really enjoyed getting to see my own content in a different way. I think that will impact my teaching for the rest of my career. As for working together after the fellowship ends, I would be more than open to that, but at this moment have very few ideas on how to continue to do that beyond inviting him to my classroom to speak.