OAPT American Association of
Physics Teachers		 AAPT

Winter Meeting 2009

Chicago, February 11-16, 2009

The Winter 2009 AAPT Meeting took place in Chicago. It attracted more than 900 AAPT members and it took place in conjunction with the AAAS meeting. The program for the meeting can be found at www.aapt.org Many interesting things took place during the meeting, so I will try to emphasize very few that are relevant to our section.

  1. AAPT approved a proposal for the Associate Membership.The complete information will be posted online shortly. Members will be able to join AAPT for a reduced price of $36 (US) a year which will allow them to benefit from many of the resources offered by the AAPT. In addition, 25% of the AAPT member dues will go back to the sections for either full or Associate membership. Currently our section has only 39 AAPT members. I think we should think how to attract more members, especially since we will get 25% of the dues back to the section. Remember, that as a section we benefit not only from the meetings, but also from the invited talks and workshops at our meetings sponsored by the AAPT, by the journals (The Physics Teacher and the American Journal of Physics), by online resources (comPADRE), by the PTRA events such as the one Diana Hall is organizing right now (she received a $2,000 grant from the AAPT for it), etc. I will e-mail you all the details. I hope we will be able to make our OAPT Spring Meeting Attendees aware of it and will be able to recruit new members. Notice, that if people sign up for the full membership (which costs about 140 dollars, the 25% of it will cover the section dues, so we might be able to make these people members of the OAPT section automatically).
  2. Quebec became a fourth Canadian Section to become a member of the AAPT: BC, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec. We might want to communicate with each other and discuss what as Canadian, do we want from the AAPT and how we can contribute to its success. I think it is great news.
  3. As the OAPT Section Rep, I was honoured by being elected to be a Vice-Chair of the Section Representatives and as a result a member of the AAPT Executive Board. I will be the first non-American EB member. I will work hard to promote the interests of non-US Sections and make the organization truly an international one. We have now 4 Canadian sections and one Mexican section - so 5 out of 51 sections are outside of the US. In addition, Tetyana Antimirova was elected to be a member of the International Committee.
  4. The summer meeting will take place in Ann Arbor Michigan and the abstracts are due March 6th. Since Ann-Arbor is drivable from Ontario, we might want to organize a car pool or to think how we can reduce the cost of attending the meeting. As an International Members, we already have 50% registration fee. Remember, in the summer, dorms will be available, which will drastically reduce the cost of the meeting. I really hope many of our members will be able to go: www.aapt.org.
  5. AAPT members will be able to view videotapes talks from the Winter Meeting by logging into the www.aapt.org. These talks will include the presentation by Al Gore as well as an amazing session organized by the Women in Physics Committee: "Women and men of Manhattan Project". I enjoyed it very much and recommend you to watch it.
  6. I was very fortunate to attend the Fermi Lab tour. They have a web site and they offer lots of free resources for teachers. Go and take a look, I am sure you will find something interesting for your students.

Marina Milner-Bolotin