CERN

We have a very tired department this morning as we arrived back from CERN at midnight last night.

It was worth the tiredness though. On Wednesday we arrived in Switzerland, booked into our hotel and then headed to Geneva for a tour of the United Nations building. We'd not done that before and it was a bit of a last minute thought but I think we'll probably do it again as it was a really interesting tour and the students all said they enjoyed it.

After a night on the town in Geneva we were up bright and early for our day at CERN. First we had a talk about the history of CERN and what they do there, then we were driven to the far side of the ring to visit the CMS cavern. This was a first for us and very impressive! If only we'd been there 2 days earlier - they had the detector open then for maintenance, but now it's closed again as they are getting ready to fire everything back up early next year. After CMS we had a visit to the magnet testing facility then time to relax in the CERN canteen before we headed back to the airport for the flight home.

All in all it was a pretty successful trip. we had the occasional misplaced passport and some slow moving students, but no one got lost or injured and everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. Next up - Rome again. Or maybe not as the school are still deciding whether we are allowed two physics trips in one term. I won't be heartbroken if I don't have to book another set of flights!

A rod for my own back

When I took on the TA thing (which is going pretty well and is mostly good fun), my department agreed that in order for me to manage my increased work load I should drop a lot of the admin stuff I do for them. This term I have had very few photocopying or data entry requests which is great!


The annual trip to CERN is upon us again and of course my HoD has dealt with all the paperwork and admin himself. Wait, no sorry - I got confused for a second there. What I meant to say was that I have done all the paperwork and admin yet again. This morning I did the final job, which was getting the bus timetables for the various journeys we'll be making in Switzerland. Maybe I should have insisted that HoD deal with it himself for once. On the other hand I know that if I don't do it then it won't get done or at least not properly, and then once we are there HoD will utter his usual plaintive cry of 'Labtech666, Help!' and I'll end up sorting it out anyway.


I grumbled about this exact same issue a year ago and of course nothing has changed. By being generally pretty efficient and helpful (unless you catch me on a bad day) I have made it very easy for the teachers to get lazy.


Still I get a free trip to Geneva out of it, so it's not all bad!

An African adventure

Every year a group of lower sixth students from my school take a 2 week trip to Gambia, where they teach science lessons to Gambian children in 4 different schools as well as doing building work to improve school facilities and even finding time to see a bit of the country.

This year, completely out of the blue, I've been asked to go on the trip! When I was first approached I honestly thought it must be a case of mistaken identity. There's a chemistry teacher with a similar name to me and I assumed it was actually her that they wanted. However, I was wrong. For the first time they are taking a technician.

It makes a lot of sense when you think about it. At the moment the students are planning their 20 minute lessons which they will be teaching around 40 times over the course of the fortnight. In previous years it's not been that unusual for students to come knocking on the prep room door a couple of days before the trip asking to borrow equipment and it's not always been possible for me to supply what they want. Being involved for the planning stage means that I can give them advice about what will work and make sure that any extra equipment is ordered in plenty of time.

When we get to Gambia I'll be in technician mode every morning, as we are teaching from 8.30 until 1, making sure the students are getting on ok with their teaching and troubleshooting any equipment issues and then in the afternoon we are visiting local villages and markets as well as a reptile farm, spending time on the beach, having drumming lessons(!) and generally enjoying ourselves.

I'm still stunned to have been invited, but what an opportunity!

Trips

The annual trip to CERN went off this morning. I'm not able to go this year, but as usual I have been heavily involved in the planning and organisation.

As I was dealing with last minute paperwork yesterday I got to wondering whether I am too much of a pushover. Surely the teachers should be doing this stuff themselves? I know that my HoD panics and flaps and is not the most organised person in the world, so I do all this stuff for him because at least that way I know it will be done properly.

For the CERN trip I have:

* Organised getting the passport details from all the students (making photocopies, recording info in a spreadsheet)
* Booked the flights
* Liased with the school transport manager to book the coach to the airport
* Printed out the boarding passes
* Arranged the groups for the guided tour
* Organised which students are sharing which rooms at the hotel (HoD booked the hotel)
* Downloaded and printed out maps of the hotel, highlighting where the nearest bus stops are
* Printed out timetables for all the buses that the group will need to take between Geneva airport, CERN and the hotel
* Organised all the above paperwork in a file for HoD to take with him

Genuine question to any fellow technicians reading this - Am I an idiot? Should I have said no a long time ago to doing all of this?

Once they get back from CERN we start all over again, as it's only 7 weeks until the trip to Rome and the Vatican Observatory. Arrgh!

'It's broken!'

How often have you heard a student claim that a piece of equipment is 'broken' when in fact they just aren't using it properly? Maybe they've turned the dial on the multimeter to the wrong setting, or connected up the oscilloscope incorrectly, but in my experience at least 60% of 'broken' equipment actually works fine if you know what you're doing.

Yesterday the physics trip to the Vatican observatory headed off. They don't come back until friday so there are quite a few lessons which need to have cover work set. The trip was booked months ago, so naturally the teachers had prepared everything well in advance - yeah, right! With an hour to go before departure astroboy was still sorting out all his cover work. He came into the prep room looking really stressed and said could he e-mail some of the work to me to print out for him because, and I quote, 'the photocopier is broken'.

Once he'd sent me the work, I headed off to the copier room to see just how badly 'broken' the photocopier actually was. 30 seconds later I had cleared the paper jam and it was working again.

*sigh*

Trips

The CERN trip went very well, all things considered. Travelling abroad with 30 teenagers is rather stressful, and feels a bit like herding cats at times, but to their credit they managed to be at all the meeting points at the right times and we didn't lose anyone.

Next on the agenda - Rome. The trip to the Vatican Observatory heads off in under 3 weeks so we have to finalise the paperwork for that.

It never ends!

CERN here we come

Tomorrow we head off to Switzerland for our 4th annual visit to CERN. I'm looking forward to it, but as always I am at the stage now where I am terrified that something will go wrong and it will be my fault.

We started booking flights etc pretty much as soon as term started, in September, but it's really difficult to pin down some of these kids and their parents. One lad's family seemed to feel that his passport was in some way classified information and were incredibly reluctant to give us the details we needed to confirm his flight. Another lad has decided that, even though his parents filled in all the paperwork, he doesn't actually want to go on the trip.

My eternal nightmare for every physics trip is that we will turn up to the airport and find that not everyone has a plane ticket, or that I've booked it for the wrong day. At least I'm not responsible for booking hotel rooms. HoD dealt with that, so if we don't have enough beds it's not my fault!

What's our job again?

I've mentioned in the past the wide range of extra curricular activities that we do here in the physics department - trips, astronomy, solar car etc.
Just lately though, it's feeling like we're starting to forget that the main focus of our jobs is supposed to be the teaching of physics!

The solar car project is having a big launch event on saturday. We've got Cambridge University coming along with their car as well as potential sponsors including McLaren and Jaguar. It's a really big deal and if it goes well then the project will really take off. It's a lot of work though. My HoD has been running around like crazy for the last couple of weeks putting arrangements in place. Meanwhile the organisation of the 2 overseas trips that are happening before christmas has mainly fallen to me and I'm worrying that it's all going to go wrong.

Lesson planning is virtually non-existant right now and last minute requests are becoming the norm. It's as if they've all forgotten that lessons are happening because they are so caught up in other things. I really hope that once this weekend is out of the way we can get back on track, or I'll be heading for a nervous breakdown by new year.

The prep room travel agency..

... is open for business.

Can it really be that time again already? Yup, I'm afraid so. Today we book the flights for this year's CERN trip. We've got the largest group yet - 32 of us altogether including the college chaplain which should be 'interesting'.

We're meant to be heading back to the Vatican Observatory in early december as well, so I expect I'll be booking more flights in the very near future.

Travel chaos

It's nearly time for this year's trip to the Vatican Observatory and as always I have been acting as travel agent. I'm not even going on the trip this year (to find out why, see my other blog) but I've still booked all the flights and sorted the paperwork.
It's seemed a little more chaotic than usual this year. I think the recession etc has made itself felt, as a lot of kids just couldn't afford to come and those that are going have been quite slow to confirm. As a result I've had to book the flights in about 6 seperate batches. I just hope I've got it all right or there will be trouble next thursday when they get to the airport!

An inspection looms

The fear of inspection is most definitely growing!

Last week I did a lovely notice board display with the photos from the most recent CERN trip. This has apparently indicated my supreme skill at putting stuff on the wall so I've now been asked to do another board highlighting all the extra-curricular and enrichment activities that we are involved with.
Once we started making the list it was actually quite an impressive array of stuff!

The latest big idea is to design and build a solar powered car with the ultimate aim of competeing in a race across Australia. It's a huge project and it'll be amazing if we can pull it off!

Sadly that is somewhat in the future and for now I am helping my HoD sort out the schemes of work so we've got something tangible to show the inspectors. No one will ever actually work to the scheme, but management want them done, so we have to do them. Lots of photocopying, laminating and organising files involved! Remember what I said about stuff that isn't my job? Yep, lots of that.

Interesting stuff!

Faster than light neutrinos

Wish I was going on the CERN trip this year!

Am I a travel agent?

I currently have a small tower on my desk, composed of kids' passports. I've got British, Nigerian, German, Hong Kong and even Kazakhstan!

'But why?', I hear you cry.

Well, the annual trip to CERN is only a couple of months away and it's time to book flights. More specifically, it's time for ME to book flights. I always get lumbered with this job and this time round I'm not even going on the trip.

Vatican Observatory

So, the trip to the Vatican Observatory has been completed. A couple of hitches along the way, but mostly very successful.

Originally this trip was supposed to happen in december, but Gatwick airport was closed for 3 days due to heavy snow so we had to cancel. Actually this was probably a good thing, because Rome in april is lovely!
We had trouble getting hotel rooms as Rome appeared to be full, so we ended up at an allegedly 4-star hotel in some distant suburb. Not the best place I've ever stayed, but it did the job.

We were due to visit the observatory, which is located at the Pope's summer palace 15 miles south of Rome, on friday morning. Unfortunately we discovered that there was a train strike so we had to change our plans again and friday became sightseeing day instead.

Saturday was 3rd time lucky and we finally made it to Albano where the observatory head quarters are located in a former nunnery just off the town square. We were met by Brother Guy Consolmagno, the curstor of the Vatican's meteorite collection, who gave us a tour of the building, including his workroom



and showed us some of the books from the observatory's library, including a second edition of Newton's 'Principia' which did make me squeal with excitement ever so slightly (yes, I'm a geek!)

After a walk through the pope's gardens, we went into the papal palace where the telescopes are on the roof. One of the dome's was having work done on it, so we couldn't see the refractor telescope, but we went to see the double astrograph

which was awesome, and somewhat more impressive than the telescopes we have back at school!

I think the kids really enjoyed the whole trip and I definitely did.

Now to relax and enjoy the Easter hols!

Home again...

Just got back from a tiring, eventful but very worthwhile 6th form trip to Rome and the Vatican Observatory.
Details to follow

Trips

.. as in visits, not accidents.

We're taking a group of 20 sixth form students to Rome on thursday to visit the Vatican observatory. Should be a great trip and I'm looking forward to it.

Drowning in paperwork though!
We've got everyone's permission slips, copies of passports, all the flight info printed out, info about the hotel, copies of the school's insurance policy, risk assessments, all the info about getting to and from the observatory and probably a lot more besides that I've forgotten about.
Before we leave it'll all have to be photocopied half a dozen times because all the staff on the trip need a copy, and there are a couple of people at school who have to have it too.

I can't wait to get on the plane and forget about paperwork for a couple of days. Until we get back! :(