Suffer the little children...

Best audience ever

On Wednesday I went to Ethan's school to tell them what I do for a living.  One of the moms had come the week before.  She's a florist and sent the kids home with flowers.  Pretty tough to top.  Not that it's a competition or anything...

Anyway I thought about just telling then that I'm a chocolatier:  instant popularity for Ethan.  He doesn't seem to be having any trouble in that area though.  So, thanks to Taco, I took the OSA optics discovery kit.  It has a hologram and diffraction grating, a bunch of lenses and color filters and two polarizers.  

I told them that I teach just like their teacher, Pia, does, only to older kids, and that I study light.  They liked adding the color filters together and wanted to know how to make a hologram.  We played around with the diffraction grating and my laser pointer.  

I decided that I could explain polarization to kindergarteners. Anyone who has been through one of my late-semester lectures knows that I can sometimes overreach.   I told them that light is a wave and I got a big rope (you can see it on the ground in one of the photos) from the facilities guy, Hari.  We held it out and made waves on it, oscillating in one plane then another.  I showed then how to block one kind of wave but not the other.  They mostly just liked playing with the rope.  Then I passed the polarizers around.  They seemed to like the magic of going from transparent to black by rotating one of the plates.  I'm not sure they really got the connection to the rope, but maybe.  Ethan seems to get it.

Anyway, I pulled it all off in Dutch, so I have now given a lecture in Dutch.

Here Pia gets the kids  ready for recess

Here is Ethan out at recess in the sandbox.

The entourage I always wanted


I am now apparently ``in.'' The next day, all the kids whose parents couldn't stay to read to them (this is what they do at the start of school here) came to me and Ethan for me to read to all of them. Cool. I have an entourage.

Word of the day
veiligheid safety. De laserveiligheid is voor gerechtelijke landen.