In May, just like you, I was looking forward to some leisurely time off at the end of June, reading a few good books and possibly working on a tan -- but that isn't happening. Instead, I am taking a course at Boston Univerity called Research Experience for Teachers or RET for short.
This is a 6 week course where teachers have the opportunity to work in the field and learn about how Science is being used in the real world.
This course is on Biophotonics ( Bio -- what?!...) - Essentially it's looking at life science (biology), general science ( scientific method) and engineering to enhance things like X Ray machines, find Skin Cancer with Lasers or Identify diseases with light.
I thought that this would be truly exciting so I signed up and got in!
We were partnered with a lab team and another teacher (the other teacher is a pretty cool guy - Mr. P- that teaches Physics and Astronomy in Weymouth). My lab is on "Scintillation measurements for high resolution X-Ray project lab"- the Lab Professor is Ted Morse.
I was given two assignements for the first week -- 1. learn as much as you can about Fiber Optics and 2. learn as much as you can about Total Internal Reflection or TIR for short.
I have to say that there is a big learning curve and I have a lot of catching up on reading and understanding of these two topics -- I guess my summer reading isn't as light as I thought it would be.... More to come, me and my lab partner's project this week is to devise a way for the Silicon solution to spray evenly onto the glass tube... I'll explain with pictures in my next blog.
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