OAPT American Association of
Physics Teachers		 AAPT

Winter Meeting 2010

Washington, February 13-17, 2010

The Winter AAPT meeting took place in a snowed under Washington DC. This was a big issue as lots of flights had been canceled and we were worried about being able to come. Luckily my flights were OK. This was a joint meeting between the APS and AAPT. There were about 800+ people from the AAPT and about 1200 from the APS. So it was a big event. We had about 10 Canadian members there ( mainly from ON and QC). I am forwarding you a short report I created to keep you posted. I recommend you to check the AAPT web site: www.aapt.org for detailed information. Here I just wanted to point out a few things in my view relevant to us.

  1. Physics Teacher Education Coalition - PhysTEC - received a new grant and will be looking for more sites. Check their web site to see if you might want to join it.
  2. The summer AAPT meeting will take place in Portland Oregon.
  3. There are lots of SMET initiatives in the US. Just google "Obama SMET" and you will be amazed at what is going on there. The funding of SMET disciplines in the States now reached an unprecedented level. Unfortunately we cannot apply for these funds being in Canada. Yet, we might think of possible collaborations. We also might thing of how to tell our government that investment in SMET is a strategic investment and they cannot ignore us.
  4. At the AAPT, our own Patrick Whippey received an award - a Distinguished Service Citation. Patrick has been with the ON APT for a long time, he maintains our web site and does lots of great things for the ON section and for Canada. We are very proud of Patrick.
  5. We had a special section representatives retreat and discussed many issues, including the web site template for the sections. One of the things we discussed is the Associate Membership. This is a very timely opportunity for people who have never been AAPT members or whose membership lapsed 3 years ago or more. Check the web site: http://www.aapt.org/Membership/upload/090817-Associate-Membership.pdf Remember, it is only 36 dollars a year and 25% of it will go back to the section. This will be useful for the summer should you want to go to Oregon.
  6. The web site www.aapt.org has a number of talks recorded. One of the presenters was Sheila Tobias whose books many of you have probably read. I liked her talk. She just finished another book: http://sheilatobias.com/
  7. Based on what I saw at the AAPT, I think we should think what as an organization we can do to have physics education research funded in Canada. The PER means doing all the activities the PhysTEC people are doing to train better physics teachers and more. We could have done much more than what we are doing if we had some support.
  8. PhysTEC produced a 5 min video clip on Physics Teaching. I have a DVD and it is on YouTube. Check their web site: http://www.phystec.org/

Marina Milner-Bolotin