Chicago-area high school physics teacher Jeff Rylander brings high-energy physics experience and teaching to his classroom after his on-the-job training in Argonne's High Energy Physics Division.

Teachers study high-energy physics

For many students attending high school, physics classes generally teach the more readily understood classical Newtonian mechanics and largely ignore much of modern discoveries, such as quantum theory. To help enrich students’ physics experiences, Argonne has joined a program called QuarkNet that helps teachers broaden their physics curriculum.

Jeff Rylander, a physics teacher at Maine East High School in Park Ridge, Ill., sought to understand physics at a deeper level, especially high-energy physics, and at the same time appreciate the machinery that often runs physics experiments. He also wanted to learn to base more of his teaching on student inquiry.

“Although high-energy physics is rarely covered in high school, it is often a subject that students are interested in learning about,” said Rylander. “I feel that I need to become better versed in all areas of physics in order to more effectively give my students a well-rounded introduction to the discipline.”

The concept of QuarkNet arose from discussions among particle physicists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland. The program’s five-year funding began in 1999 through support from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and participating research groups.

Rylander was selected as the lead teacher for the QuarkNet program at Argonne. Before he could teach high-energy physics to his students, Rylander had to obtain an on-the-job understanding of physics experiments. Rylander worked with Hal Spinka, Dave Underwood, Bob Cadman and Tom Kasprzyk of Argonne’s High Energy Physics Division, term appointee Keith Krueger and undergraduates Meghan Gagliardi and Mike Bates. They spent 10 weeks building and calibrating a subdetector within the STAR detector of Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, the world’s newest and biggest particle accelerator for studies in nuclear physics.

The STAR detector will search for answers to some of the most basic questions about the properties of matter and the universe’s evolution.

Rylander, Spinka and Bob Wagner will plan activities for 10 other high school physics teachers who will come to Argonne next summer. Rylander and the other participating teachers will receive college credit from Aurora University for their efforts.

“We believe this program will have something for both the experienced physics teacher and the novice alike,” said Rylander, who has taught physics for 11 years.

During the school year, Rylander will teach his students some of the concepts and experiments he worked with while at Argonne. Eventually, Rylander hopes QuarkNet will involve 100,000 students from 600 U.S. high schools in Web-based analysis of real data, collaboration with other students worldwide, remote control of television cameras in experimental areas and visits to the experiments.

In the Chicago metropolitan area, four research organizations have participated in QuarkNet: Argonne, Fermilab, the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois-Chicago. Now entering its third year, Quark-Net has established an average of 12 program centers each year and expects to see another 24 centers join during the next two years.

For more information, please contact Dave Jacqué.

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