It's that magical time of year when everyone seems to be ill. Exams still loom between now and the promise of a few weeks freedom and relaxation at home - although whether a house full of your family counts as relaxation is another matter. But I'm already off topic. The point is that I managed to miss my first meeting with the school that I was set up with because I was ill and overslept.
This might be where the downside of being in my generation shows itself. Realising that is would miss the meeting, my first reaction was to email the staff member I was supposed to be talking to. Twice. I then assumed that they would see the email and walked out to the school, only to find it empty. Classes didn't run on Friday afternoons, and the teacher was already at home.
The thing is that I'm so used to constantly using text, facebook and email (I haven't quite resorted to Twitter yet but I'll probably crack soon) that the concept of making concrete plans is quite an unusual one for me. I might set a time for something with a friend, but it'd be absolutely normal for us to change our minds about 5 times in the course of the day about exactly what, if anything, was happening. So the business of making an appointment a few days or weeks in advance, and the remembering it and sticking to it, is something I find quite unusual, even though for real-person everyday life it's obviously completely standard and very important.
So yes. First lesson - don't always assume someone's glued to their social media feeds. Keep appointments.
A week later and I'd managed to actually make it into the school on time to meet the member of staff I'd be collaborating with, and we'd even set a time when I'd come into the school to watch a first year class to begin to get to know the students.
Here's another thing - sometimes people might take you at your word. I mentioned that I hadn't worked with students in a school before, but that I had done theatre work with the same age group. Inevitably the fact that I was interested in theatre cropped up. Within half an hour this had managed to morph into the idea that I might run a physics/ drama style workshop with some of the younger students. I don't think this'll happen until I know the students well enough for them to not just laugh at me, but it should make for some good anecdotes when it does. Whether they'll be at my expense remains to be seen (probably).
It was a good class to sit in on, because they were all writing up 'Space' projects that they'd researched on-line the session before. This particular group were 11 to 12. Easy! They'll all be writing about the first moon landing and what a comet is.
Ha. I reckoned without the the world of Wikipedia. Within the space of 40 minutes, I was asked what degenerated matter was (I wasn't sure), for one of the forces in the Standard Model (I mind-blanked electromagnetism so ended up trying to explain the strong force), if I knew what the Pauli-exclusion principle was (fermions when you're 12??) and whether it was true that you don't have to go to any of your classes at University (no comment).
I realised that I sometimes (in fact, normally) feel that I don't know anything about Physics. I'm at that awkward stage when I have a really really vague grasp on what some of the more complicated concepts are (I sort of get what a boson is . . . ) and seem to have largely forgotten the more basic ones (I actually couldn't remember for the life of me any details about comets). Generally my brain is just a big mush of half-learned algebra and trigonometry. To put it in other words, I don't know anything useful. Not to keep a 12-year-old engaged. Can I explain properly why a black hole sucks stuff in? Er, no. But I can orthanormalise a vector for you!
I suppose everyone goes through stages where they feel like their brain's so full of jumble they don't know anything at all. But the brilliant thing was, as soon as I got home I went and read up on all the things I'd been asked about. 2 hours too late but if they ask me again I'm prepared. Meaning the irony of the situation is that rather than my having dazzled them with my undergraduate knowledge, I was actually the one that came out of the day having learnt something.
Give me another few months with the 12-year-olds and I might be able to actually tell you some interesting stuff about physics.
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