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A little story for you:
jms — (archived)

When I was a young Graduate student, I spent a summer as a teaching assistant for a NSF funded program for advanced high school kids. The application process was very selective and we ended up with a group of kids that were a joy to teach. We taught them the normal college level introductory class and added material from upper level classes as well, including a short indroduction to mineral optics. They soaked it all up like sponges.

We dragged them all over the South West. I remember taking them up the side of a cirque wall in Rocky Mountain National Park over trailess talus slopes up above 12,000 feet. We didn't just show them things, we made them go out and map and figure out out-crops before we'd begin to work the problem with them. We stressed observation before conclusion and the value of multiple working hypotheses. They were some of the finest students I have ever taught. Quick, eager, excited, and really damn smart. When I've taught, there are usually a student or two in every class that I know were smarter than me. With this class, they were all that way! I'd gloss over small things in structural geology (where 4D thought is crucial) and these kids would point out the exceptions to the rules I was presenting, something that rarely happened even in the upper level classes I taught. They sure kept me on my toes.

I'll let you (and everybody else) in on a little secret I've been holding out on, Tech: One of the brightest of those students was a 15 year old R.L.

Now, as they say, you know the rest of the story.

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