Let's Science Dialogue!

Today, I really had a once-in-a-lifetime experience. The Japanese government has a program ("Science Dialogue") for promoting scientific careers for young students. Foreign researchers are invited to give lectures in English on their research fields at Japanese high schools. I was invited to participate earlier this spring, and today was the day!

My talk was at the Akashi College of Technology, which is a school for students aged 16-20. Roughly speaking, it combines three years of high school with two years of college. My audience was a class of about forty 16-year-old students. (Incidentally, the textbook for their class was fantastic. It weighed about half a pound and cost about $15. Now think about your freshman algebra or calculus textbook, and compare...)

Giving the lecture was a lot of fun, but it was also quite difficult. First of all, I gave a presentation (see the slides) instead of using the chalkboard, which was a first for me. Using slides was necessary so that I could add Japanese translations for the terms in my talk. Second, it was important for me to speak slowly, so that the students could follow my English. My normal lecture style is very quick, and I like to walk back and forth as I talk. Now, I suddenly had to stay in one place and deliberately speak very slowly. This was pretty disorienting for me.

My research collaborator also came, and acted as a translator during parts of the talk. (He also helped me in translating my slides.) After the talk, I took questions from the students. This involved a lot of giggling, because the students were required to ask their questions in English, and this appeared to make them nervous. One girl in the audience impressed everyone by spotting an error on one of my slides... (I had written 41616 = 194^2 instead of 204^2. The slide appeared on-screen for perhaps a minute at most -- how she spotted the error is beyond me!)

Most of the questions were rather off topic, but still fun to answer. One student wanted to know what Japanese food I liked, another wanted my opinion of their textbook. A third student asked how long I had been married!

Here is a picture we took afterwards. I am sitting between Renee and my collaborator. On the other side of Renee is Matsumiya-sensei, the class's teacher. (We're all holding up three fingers in celebration of triangular numbers, which figured prominently in my talk.)You can get more pictures of the event from this link. In a couple of months, I'll get a report of student evaluations. I hope they liked the talk!