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Wednesday, December 27, 2017

Super-fast imaging methods to see what the atomic world is doing!

There is always a good deal of interest when we bring up methods of how scientists observe small things - and we are talking molecular level on down to individual particles. This is the quantum realm.

A really interesting review article is posted by Nature, one of the leading science journals on the planet. Check it out to see scales down to 'atto' in the metric system. This is 10^-18, or one billionth of a billionth! Yes, we can talk about such scales both in terms of space and time scales! Enjoy!

Thank you to all who helped our African friends!!

Over the past 1.5 years, ETHS students and teachers have helped raise funds for friends in Malawi and Kenyan schools. ETHS sent $6400 to Malawi schools that are working with star teacher Andrews Nchessie, where land was purchased by the schools for their own crops. In addition, seed, fertilizer, materials for chicken coups, and funding to drill wells and put in irrigation systems were purchased so the schools can be self-sustaining during future droughts, and avoid the rampant famine from the past three years in that part of Africa.

For Kenya, $400 was wired in order for Makonjamare Primary School to purchase sporting equipment. This school is in rural Kenya, and they do not have any real balls or other equipment to play with. This school has another star teacher, Jacqueline Jumba-Kehura, who is our contact. Jacque founded the Lifting the Barriers Program in Kenya, and has helped teachers develop new teaching methods for rural, poor schools across the country. She has gained international recognition for this work!

We hope to develop some other collaborative classroom projects with these schools in the near future, which should be great fun!

JUNIORS - Fermilab TARGET Program for Summer Internship

Fermilab, which is about one hour from Evanston out in Batavia, has a summer internship for high school students. Called the TARGET Program, students work for 6 weeks and can make a stipend on top of it. This is a non-residential program, so you would need to have transportation for the full 6 weeks, and it is 8 hours per day.

The deadline for applications is February 21, 2018. Check out the link for the program, as students are exposed to how high energy particle physics is done!! There is an emphasis on underrepresented students in particle physics, which is primarily minority and female students.

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Congratulations to the Global Teacher Prize Top 50 Finalists, Class of 2017!

A new batch of 50 ridiculously talented teachers from all around the world have been selected as this year's Top 50 Finalists in the Global Teacher Prize. This is run through the Varkey Foundation (in the United Kingdom), and is now known as the 'Nobel Prize for Teaching.' One of these teachers will end up winning a $1 million award in March of 2018, at a ceremony in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.This is the fourth year of the GTP, and tens of thousands teachers of all age groups have been nominated from some 170 countries. Congratulations to all of these wonderful people! One of them is from Chicago Public Schools.