The `Cavendish Experience' to CERN 1998

Abstract

The first time that Brenda Jennison mentioned her idea to charter an aircraft and fly a huge party of school children to CERN for a day we were stood on a bridge over the Avon gorge in Bristol. Left with the choice of jumping or agreeing that this was a great idea I did the honourable thing. Since that visit in 1994 there have been two further visits and it has almost unintentionally become a regular fixture in some schools' calendars. We are familiar during classroom teaching with the idea that what the student has heard us say seems almost entirely different to what we thought we had said. Does the same apply to visits? Are a group of teachers seeing one thing and a group of students another? To try to probe this hidden mystery of the adolescent mind one was asked to write up his reflections on the 1998 visit to Geneva. Philip Britton