Morton Junior High teacher Melissa Winchell could write a great “What I did over summer vacation” paper. She spent the summer working at Fermilab in Batavia.
Fermilab is a world-class, particle physics laboratory that studies the nature of elementary particles and their interactions.
“The coolest part was learning about particle physics and touring the different parts of Fermilab. It is just mind-boggling the people that work there, they are geniuses,” Winchell said.
Winchell was one of several junior-high and high-school teachers who worked at Fermilab this summer. She worked on writing code to design a Web page from scratch.
This experience allowed her to work with physicists and also interact with other science teachers. She teaches science at the eighth-grade level at MJHS, and her class focuses on chemistry and physics.
“I was excited to come back and talk to the kids,” she said.
She also wants her students to be prepared for high school and she learned from fellow teachers this summer that it is important to have students that not only know the scientific method, but have the ability to ask questions about any topic.
Winchell is considering working at Fermilab again, but she has another goal in mind. She would like to be part of a summer program at CERN, the Eurpoean Organization for Nuclear Research — the world’s largest particle physics laboratory in Switzerland.
“It was just so much fun working up there, it was like a vacation,” Winchell said.
