By MEALAND RAGLAND-HUDGINS
Rutherford County Schools
June 13, 2024
Some of the best lessons Gayle Dawson learned in elementary school came from the boiler room at Homer Pittard Campus School.
It was where she’d spend afternoons making a game out of cleaning blackboard erasers while learning about trajectory and angles thanks to the school’s custodian. Her curiosity and love for science only grew from there.
Dawson just finished her 23rd year at Blackman High School, where she teaches chemistry, conceptual physics and environmental science. Each year, she has applied to participate in an intensive workshop at CERN (the European Council for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, Switzerland. This year she was accepted and will spend two weeks learning about current particle physics research.
According to its website, CERN’s best-known technology is the World Wide Web, with the cloud-based computing grid being one of the most revolutionary.
One of seven original Blackman High faculty members still teaching at the school, Dawson is a graduate of MTSU and Oakland High School.
She shared how her elementary school principal and janitor played a crucial role in her education and the professional development opportunities being in the CERN network provides.
Q: What is so special about this conference that you have applied for it for 20-plus years?
Dawson: I do a program called QuarkNet, which is the study particle physics, at Vanderbilt. Part of QuarkNet is you have the opportunity to go. Only four people from the United States get to go. There will be people from 48 countries.
CERN is where they discovered the World Wide Web. I’ve seen the superconductor in Chicago. Basically, they take electrons and spin them as fast as they can and run them into steel walls. Then you just sit to see what happens, kind of like ‘The Big Bang Theory.’
Q: Where did your love of science come from?
Dawson: I went to Campus School in the mid-1970s. My principal, Miss (Martha) Hampton, bless her soul, she was amazing. I instigated a whole lot of stuff, so I was always in the principal’s office. Miss Hampton had a desk in her office just for me. When we had visitors, I would give tours. They didn't have gifted programs back then, but I worked through the whole fifth grade and sixth grade science curriculums in third grade with her.
Had she been an English (teacher), I’d probably have taken off in English.
I don’t remember the janitor’s name, but he was great, too. I’d get all my classwork and homework done before lunch, so I had all afternoon to do other stuff. I collected all the erasers in the whole school and take them downstairs to the creepy boiler room to the eraser cleaner. It had a crank on it and when the erasers were clean, they’d fly out at the target he put on the wall. We’d figure out the trajectory, how many rotations I had to make to hit the bull's eye. How far away the bull's eye was determined how fast I had to turn the handle. Take a measurement, it's a 45-degree angle. Well, what if I bump it up to a 60-degree angle? Does that change how many times I turn the handle? It became a game and a challenge. I hated the boiler room, but I had a blast because he had a target sitting on the wall. He would have been an amazing teacher.
But I think that's honestly where it started. Everybody was surprised that I went into science because music paid my way through college.
Q: What instrument did you play?
Dawson: Bassoon. In my junior year of high school, I was in the MTSU orchestra and the Nashville Youth Symphony. My bassoon instructor was in the Nashville Symphony, so I got to play with them some, too.
Science and music are so interrelated. When you're talking about sound waves, you talk about the different tones and overtones. Maybe you want to pull in math. You're going to talk about timing of the beats and the length of notes and the rests. That’s all math.
Q: What are you most looking forward to from CERN?
Dawson: Getting to go to Switzerland. It's going to be a challenge. It's not like you get to go and it's a two-week vacation. You're there with teachers from all over the world. I’ve been told we are going to shadow one of their main scientists, so that's going to be a huge, huge mental challenge.
Q: What else should science educators know about CERN or QuarkNet?
Dawson: I wish more science teachers would take advantage of QuarkNet. The program in the summer is a week long and based at Vanderbilt. We do field trips. I've been to Fermilab (the U.S. particle physics and accelerator laboratory) outside of Chicago, which is really neat. Been to Colorado to see the atomic clock. So I've gotten to do a lot of travel. We've been up to Oak Ridge. I personally do a whole lesson history on the history of Oak Ridge. If you live in Tennessee, you need to know how important Oak Ridge is. You don’t have to be a physics person to enjoy QuarkNet, just a science person.
PHOTO: Blackman High teacher Gayle Dawson holds a bridge built from balsa wood constructed by a former student for competition. MEALAND RAGLAND-HUDGINS/RUTHERFORD COUNTY SCHOOLS