Earl Blodgett

Phillips:

This is Jon Phillips, Assistant Oral Historian, at the American Institute of Physics. I'm here with Dr. Earl Blodgett. Today is February 4th, 2021. And I thank you again for doing this Earl.

Blodgett:

Oh, you're very welcome.

Phillips:

So to start off can you tell me your current title and institutional affiliation?

Blodgett:

All right. I am a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. I'm also the director of the STEM Teach Graduate Program on our campus. And I am the director of our Undergraduate Scholarly Research and Creative Activity (USRCA) program. And I am the national historian for the Society of Physics Students and Sigma Phi Sigma.

Phillips:

So you're a very busy man.

Blodgett:

Yeah. [Laughs]

Phillips:

So to sort of start off the interview, let's go back to the beginning. And where are you from originally?

Blodgett:

I am from about one hundred and twenty yards from where I am presently sitting. I live on the farm that I grew up on, OK, in the country near a little village called Boyceville in northern Wisconsin. OK.

Phillips:

And so it's a farm. So were your parent’s farmers? Is that a good description?

Blodgett:

My father was a dairy farmer, a small dairy farmer, and my mother was a schoolteacher. She got her teaching license back in 1937.

Phillips:

Oh, wow.

Blodgett:

Going to a normal school at that point in time, you could get a license to teach in a rural one room school with one year of intense preparation.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

Right. So she was less than twenty years old and she was out there teaching in a one room school with like twenty-eight kids, grades one through eight. And none of her first graders spoke English and she didn't speak Slovak.

Phillips:

Oh, so was this in Boyceville?

Blodgett:

Well, you know, about, well, eight miles north of Boyceville because it was a rural school.

Phillips:

Right. And was there a large Slovakian population there?

Blodgett:

Yeah, north of town was the Slovak immigrants.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

West of town was the Norwegians; south was the Scottish and Germans and then there was the Yankees in the area. [Laughs]

Phillips:

That sounds like a very interesting place. So your mom was a teacher there. Is that where you went to school as well?

Blodgett:

Yes. Yes. So I graduated from Boyceville High School in 1976. [I was] class valedictorian and all that fun stuff. My connection with [University of Wisconsin] River Falls is pretty long standing because in 1938, my mom started taking classes at River Falls to nibble away on getting a four-year degree. She finished that in 1968.

Phillips:

Oh, wow.

Blodgett:

She liked to joke that she was a slow learner, but, you know, life happens.

Phillips:

Absolutely. And it's pretty impressive to stick with it for that long.

Blodgett:

So when I was a little kid I would occasionally get to go with when she'd be going to like summer school classes or something like that. And I'm the tail end kid in the family and I was three years old when my brother, the oldest, went off to college at River Falls

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

And I am told that I declared that I was going to go to college too. I wasn't going to mess around with all this grade school stuff.

Phillips:

So was that brother the first person in your family to go to college?

Blodgett:

Well, that's the interesting distinction since, you know, mom started college.

Phillips:

I guess that's true. She started first year.

Blodgett:

She didn't finish until after Frank had graduated.

Phillips:

Right. So first to get a degree, but not first to matriculate.

Blodgett:

Right. Right. So I've got... In my family, my brother and one of my sisters have bachelor's degrees, another other one went and did a couple of years of College, a Masters of Divinity, and my other sister is an M.D. and she was a physics major at River Falls.

Phillips:

OK, and then went on to medical school from there?

Blodgett:

Right. So I always tell my students a physics degree is an excellent entree into medical school. You know, biology majors are a dime a dozen applying to medical school.

Phillips:

That's true. I started out as a biology major in lecture halls for 300 students, and three quarters of them were pre-med.

Blodgett:

Yeah. So if you if you come in there with something different, that automatically perks up attention from the admissions committee. So anyway, here's the story.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

So I'm in third grade and Beth is in her junior year as a physics major.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

And she's come home from college and, as little brothers are wont to be, I was pestering her and asking her to explain what it was that she was studying. And so she showed me the equations of motion for a projectile, a two-dimensional motion, and how you could use this amazing, mysterious math.... I didn't know what t-squared was, right? To predict exactly where the projectile would land at all. That was great. That was it. So, up until that point I was either going to do paleontology or chemistry or something, but now it was physics.

Phillips:

So, third grade. You'd made up your mind.

Blodgett:

Third grade. That's when I got fired up for physics.

Phillips:

And did you completely abandon paleontology? Dinosaurs were not cool anymore?

Blodgett:

I still think it's awfully cool. Yeah. My mom, just a few years ago, she remembered that I had told her before I fell in love with physics that if I went into paleontology, I was going to develop a device that would scan the ground to detect fossils. So I guess you can kind of see the physics influence already sneaking in.

Phillips:

Yeah, you are already... [Laughs] So what other sort of, you know, activities, interests growing up in that area did you have?

Blodgett:

Well, I earned money for college by picking pickles on a farm. And one of my uncles ran a bait farm in northern Wisconsin. It's chock full of little lakes with resorts. Somebody's got to sell them worms.

Phillips:

Yeah.

Blodgett:

So he raised worms and so for four summers I counted little worms in the little boxes and packed them up and shipped them off.

Phillips:

And... No, sorry. Go ahead.

Blodgett:

And I was a runner.

Phillips:

OK, for your high school team?

Blodgett:

Yeah, set our school records for mile and two mile and made it to State in the two mile.

Phillips:

So you had a long-standing conviction. You were going to go to college. You were going to study physics. Were you set on River Falls, the local school, or did you apply elsewhere?

Blodgett:

I only applied to River Falls. [Laughs]

Phillips:

And that's where all of your siblings went, too?

Blodgett:

Yep.

Phillips:

OK, so you already knew the campus pretty well?

Blodgett:

Yes. Yes. I had already studied the catalog quite thoroughly so when I first met with my advisor, I said, I'm thinking of taking this, this, this and this and this. And he said, sounds good.

Phillips:

[Laughs] Made their job easy.

Blodgett:

Yep. I always enjoy it when I get an advisee like that.

Phillips:

[Laughs]

Blodgett:

Where all I have to do is make sure they didn't miss some subtle wrinkle.

Phillips:

So coming in, I assume you had taken physics or at least science in high school prior, but what was the undergraduate, the freshman, curriculum like? Were you already ahead of the curve or were you surprised by what you learned?

Blodgett:

I had a pretty good high school physics course in some respect, in that the instructor was very experienced and we did a lot of problem solving and mathematical manipulation. But that whole year of high school physics, we did precisely two experiments because we didn't have equipment or interest in doing that. So when I got to River Falls and we actually got lab and we were doing experiments every week, that was just so exciting. That was awesome.

Phillips:

So what sort of experiments did you do in freshman physics lab?

Blodgett:

Oh, we did all the traditional ones with, you know, kinematic motions and experiments to begin facility with statistics and, you know, gliders on air tracks and yeah. All that traditional stuff.

Phillips:

Yeah, how big was the physics [department]? How many majors were there at River Falls, when you were there, do you think?

Blodgett:

Well, at that point we had a big growth bulge post-Sputnik in the sixties.

Phillips:

Fair

Blodgett:

And then in the mid, late seventies, it had gone down a little bit and then it was just ramping back up. And we had a big pre-engineering program.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

So we started out with about forty of us, much to my dismay. When I took high school physics, we had six people in physics.

Phillips:

Oh wow.

Blodgett:

Three men and three women.

My older sister was the only physicist I knew personally. And we get to college, we got close to forty of us. Two women. I'm like what the heck's wrong with this picture here? So that's been an influence on my career ever since. That this is just totally wrong. [Laughs] We’ve got to do something about this.

But a lot of those forty people, you know, either changed majors or were pre-engineers and so they transferred to another school. So we wound up with only four of us graduating at the same time four years later. Three of us went off to grad school, one in engineering, two in physics, and the other one went right to work in high school teaching.

Phillips:

Oh, OK. Very cool.

Blodgett:

Guess which one of us retired four years ago.

Phillips:

The teacher? [Laughs]

Blodgett:

Yep. Yeah. So I'm going to catch up with them. My plan is to retire this summer.

Phillips:

OK, so not too far behind. [Laughs]

Blodgett:

Right. So that was a fairly low year because through the eighties, we were averaging more like twelve to fifteen physics majors per year. In the late eighties, we started a dual degree program, a three-two program, where people could spend three years at River Falls and then transfer to a partner school for two years of upper-level engineering. And at the end of five years, they'd transfer back some engineering credits and we would give them an applied physics degree and the other school would give them an engineering degree.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

So our numbers of pre-engineers went down as our number of dual degree people went up.

Phillips:

I'm curious... And I apologize there's a recycling truck right outside.

Blodgett:

No problem.

Phillips:

So when you mentioned that, you know, it was really obvious to you right away that the ratio of men to women in the program was off. And that's something that's come up again and again in interviews that I've done. Were you aware of how other people perceived it around you? Was it something that everyone recognized as a problem or?

Blodgett:

It didn't get talked about very much. There were a couple of us that talked about it and said, you know, this is just crazy. This is wrong. But we were undergraduates, you know, what could we do about it?

Phillips:

Right.

Blodgett:

There was not a whole lot we could do. I guess we thought it would be creepy if we went out and tried to recruit for female physics majors as undergraduates.

Phillips:

Fair.

Blodgett:

And besides, you know, some stereotypes have some elements in truth. I went on one date my freshman year. It was an arranged blind date. But it worked out really well. I'm still married to her. So actually, you know, talking to girls was, you know, scary. [Both laugh]

Phillips:

I don't think you're the first or only physics undergraduate to think that.

Blodgett:

[Laughs] I got better.

Phillips:

So what other courses did you take outside of physics? Did you have a minor or was there anything else that you were particularly interested in?

Blodgett:

Well when I started out, my plan was to do a physics major with minors in math and chemistry.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

But everything I heard about organic chemistry just sounded awful because it was still taught in the traditional, this is all memorization, way. Our chemistry department doesn't teach it that way anymore.

Phillips:

That's good.

Blodgett:

So I decided I'll just take extra physics. And I wound up finishing a second major in math.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

But I actually wound up with enough physics credits to be equivalent to two physics majors.

Phillips:

Wow.

Blodgett:

Because I took all of our physics classes.

Phillips:

That makes sense. And so it was really physics and math the whole way through. And so, oh no, I keep interrupting you. I'm sorry.

Blodgett:

Of course, we had a good general education program and a liberal arts requirement so, yeah, I feel like I did get a well-rounded education from the University of Wisconsin River Falls.

Phillips:

Excellent. And so given your focus on physics and math, I assume you were planning on graduate school from the get-go. Is that fair?

Blodgett:

That was definitely on my radar as, if this does work out the way I hope it does, I would go to grad school.

Phillips:

OK, with the goal of becoming an academic physicist eventually?

Blodgett:

Oh no, that was just, I viewed that as one possibility. But I guess I was... My instructors, I think were ahead of their time in many ways. Starting around 1970, they required us all to take at least a one course in computer programing.

Phillips:

Oh, wow. Yeah.

Blodgett:

OK, so that was pretty early on in the game. And they worked computation into several spots in the physics curriculum. But they were also ahead of the game in recognizing that you can do great things with a physics degree besides go to grad school in physics. And they made it clear to us that although they were excited when any of us went to grad school in physics or grad school in engineering or grad school in anything, they were also extremely proud of the folks who went right out and got a job. So I knew that, you know, just getting a job was one possibility. But going to grad school, I knew that, yeah, I'd have to decide at some point whether I was going to go academic or industry or government lab.

Phillips:

Right. By the time you got to thinking about graduate school and applying for graduate school at that stage, had you settled on a particular subfield in physics that really grabbed you in your coursework?

Blodgett:

Oh, boy, that was hard. Cause, yeah, I took every physics course that we offered. Of course, we didn't have exotic things like general relativity or quantum field theory for undergraduates or crazy stuff like that. We didn't have quantum field theory back then, I think. [Laughs]

But I enjoyed it all. Optics was a little terrifying, but it was fascinating. I got some good stories on that, too. So I was just having a terrible time. It was like Wheel of Fortune, you know, watching the wheel spin. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Where's it going to be? Fortunately, I had a summer internship at Oakridge National Labs.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

It's now the ORAU program. And, actually, three of us, three out of the four people that wound up graduating together, we all were there together. We still have a little black and white picture of the three Oakridge boys hanging up in our physics lounge for the students to look at. But I was working in the heavy ion fusion facility, helping to design a little detector that would go in and then they'd fire up the beam and smack high relativistic heavy ions into heavy ion targets and look at all the junk that came out.

I had a great mentor! Wonderful guy. I learned a lot. One of the other people working there that summer was a nuclear physicist from Australia who said if I wanted to do nuclear physics, I had a standing offer of a fellowship to go to Australia. And I always tell my students now that getting these summer experiences is a fantastic experience because you learn a lot more about that area, including whether you don't want to do it.

Phillips:

Right. That's an important lesson.

Blodgett:

So, OK, nuclear physics, that was fine. It was interesting. But, OK, I learned I didn't want to do that. Well, we had an acoustics course at River Falls. And I had taken that acoustics course. And, being an amateur musician, that was fun. And I thought, I realized, you know, there are places that actually have graduate programs specializing in acoustics. So that's what I wound up settling on at the last minute before sending out applications in the fall of my senior year.

Phillips:

Now, I'm curious, you ended up going to River Falls right by where you'd grown up. Was Oak Ridge the first time you'd really traveled away from home for an extended period?

Blodgett:

No, with my parents, we had traveled around the country on trips when I was growing up because, well, my dad was fifty-three when I was born.

Phillips:

Oh, wow. OK.

Blodgett:

So he sold the cows and retired when I was about ten.

Phillips:

Gotcha.

Blodgett:

And then mom retired from teaching in the early seventies. But she was a teacher so we had summers, you know, that we do some traveling [in]. So I did get some traveling in beforehand. But that was... flying home. They drove me down because we could visit relatives along the way. They drove me down to drop me off. But then flying home was the first time I flew on a jet. I had flown in small airplanes but that was the first time I've flown commercially. So that was exciting.

Phillips:

Yeah, very cool. So you settled on acoustics. Where did you apply? Was it was it just Washington University or do you apply elsewhere?

Blodgett:

I'm very cautious about how I tell my current students that I was a bad student. I only applied to three places for grad school.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

I applied to Brigham Young University because they had a lot of interesting acoustics going on. And I applied to Washington University in St. Louis because of the cool sounding ultrasonics they were doing. And I applied to Michigan State University because my professors told me to.

Phillips:

OK. [Laughs]

Blodgett:

Because we had kind of a pipeline thing going there. So it was kind of a safety school in a sense, in that they really liked River Falls graduates in their physics graduate program. [Laughs] So I tell my students, you should apply to more than three stupid schools.

Phillips:

Yeah, that's good advice. [Laughs] So how did you end up at Washington?

Blodgett:

So I also give this... From my personal story, I tell students, when you get a graduate school offer. It's very exciting. Don't accept it instantly unless you're sure it's your number one choice. I got an offer from Brigham Young. I was very excited. I accepted it, started jumping through all the hoops that a non-Mormon must do to become a grad student at Brigham Young. And then I got a better offer from Wash[ington] U. [Laughs]

And another thing was an influence on this. Brigham Young sent me a catalog. And it was both an undergraduate and graduate school catalog so I could look at the interesting graduate school classes. And, of course, my wife, we got married right before our senior year.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

I got off the plane from Oak Ridge and three days later we got married.

Phillips:

Wow.

Blodgett:

OK, so she's looking through the program and I start seeing metaphorical steam coming out of her ears because she has found that at that time Brigham Young had a bachelor's degree in how to be a good housewife and mommy.

Phillips:

Ahh.

Blodgett:

Not home economics. Not consumer and family economics, as it's now known, right? And I thought, yeah, I can just see it. There will be my wife picketing on the steps of the chancellor's office. [Laughs] And, so, that just didn't sit right.

It was farther away from home. Great location, but farther away from home. So we decided to go down to St. Louis and it worked out very well.

Phillips:

And what was your wife doing at the time?

Blodgett:

Well, she got her bachelor's degree in agriculture. We have a big college of agriculture at our school.

Phillips:

Makes sense.

Blodgett:

And she was in the equine science option. We're one of the places that has a program that focuses on the horse. But she also had a minor in library science.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

All right. So we go to St. Louis. It's 1980. The economy is in the dumpster. The only place that was worse for unemployment than St. Louis was Detroit. And so it was really a tough road for her. She got a job with Kelly Temporary Services, you know, just doing odd jobs here and there and everything. And then near the end of our first year, she finally got a job in the university library at Wash U.

Phillips:

Very nice.

Blodgett:

Yep.

Phillips:

So what was moving to St. Louis like coming from, you know, this tiny town in northern Wisconsin and moving to this big industrial city?

Blodgett:

For me, it was a lot bigger shock than Marguerite. Marguerite grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

Right. [She] Went to St. Paul Central, where the white kids were a majority minority, right? So moving to St. Louis wasn't such a big shock for her. Yeah, for a little country boy here... OK, River Falls currently has a population of about twelve thousand, and I always tell people it's too big a city for me to live in.

Phillips:

[Laughs] Is that twelve thousand year-round or during the semester?

Blodgett:

No, that's year-round. So it doesn't count the students. So for me, it was a bit more of an adaptation process, but we made it through. [Laughs] We drove down. We had a beat-up old car with a U-Haul trailer on behind, and we drove down to St. Louis. We arrived in the middle of an amazing heat wave. It was like 105 in the shade. We were unloading in our U-Haul trailer, and all these wonderful little kids in the neighborhood see the two the dying white people unloading, and they helped us the most because we were just... oh. [Laughs]

Phillips:

Yeah, that sounds brutal.

Blodgett:

It was brutal. [Laughs]

Phillips:

So when you got there, did you already have an adviser sort of working with you or who was...?

Blodgett:

They had a general advisor...

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

...for incoming grad students until you made connections with a research group and your initial group. So, of course, my first semester there, I'm taking classes and working as a T.A. and I'm schmoozing it up and I'm going to seminars to see the other research groups, you know, keeping my options open. But I started talking with the folks who did acoustics and Jim Miller, professor James G. Miller said, yeah, you should start sitting in on our group meetings. And I very quickly realized that he was awesome, and the stuff they were doing was really interesting, and, yeah, I should jump on this opportunity. So I joined his research group near the end of that first year.

Phillips:

OK. And you said you were already teaching your first year?

Blodgett:

Well, at Wash U it was required that unless you had, there was like one or two fellowships, special fellowships where you didn't have to do any T.A. work. But they really wanted us all to be a T.A. And so, at that time, your standard load as a first semester grad student was three credit courses and a two-credit course in how to be a good T.A., right? And by being a T.A., you are a teaching assistant. You were not teaching the class.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

You might help with a recitation session. You might help teach a lab. But there will be a faculty person in charge of that lab and that faculty person would be there teaching as well. OK, so Wash U, I'm really proud of that grad school, as an undergraduate school it's one of those places where, yes, it's got this great research reputation, but, you know, they want to have people with PhDs teaching those undergraduates.

Phillips:

Right, that makes sense.

Blodgett:

If you're shelling out fifty grand, well at that point you're only shelling out thirty-five grand a year as an undergraduate, you know, you want to be taught by somebody who's got a degree.

Phillips:

Yeah, I can understand that. So Jim Miller's lab. What was he working on when you joined?

Blodgett:

Well, we had two major thrusts going. He was, in addition to being a professor of physics, he was also an adjunct professor in the College of Medicine.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

Because he had grants through the National Institute of Health and things like that on quantifying medical ultrasound. At that time, they were focusing on the heart, right? So the early echocardiograms that you could do, it was all about studying this picture and looking at it so much that you eventually built-up intuition about what you were looking at, right? So it took a lot of training and a lot of practice to interpret those readings to know what you were looking at. So being physicists, we wanted to put into numbers, right. So you could make measurements of the integrated backscatter of just how much energy was being scattered back and could you use that to diagnose something?

And indeed, the folks working on that were able to quantify the difference in the signal between normal tissue, a recent ischemic event. Saying, oh, pump this person full of clot busters now, stat. Versus, oh, you know, you had that heart attack about three days ago and it's scarring over so we're not going to pump you for the clot busters because they're hard on you, it's too late for that. We're going to do this treatment. So that was good.

But the other aspect was we had grants through NASA for investigating, quantifying ultrasound as a tool for nondestructive evaluation of materials as opposed to nondestructive evaluation of the heart. And that's what I wanted, which was awesome because, you know, I'd always wanted to work for NASA. And so while I was a grad student, NASA was paying me to be a grad student. So that was great.

So we were looking at graphite epoxy. Graphite fibers are stronger than steel along their length, so if you embed them in plastic, you get something that's lightweight. It's as strong as steel in the direction of the fibers and as strongest plastic the other directions. And the acoustics are fabulously weird. [Laughs]

Phillips:

And so you came in, you were attached to that project. How many other people were working on that with you?

Blodgett:

Well, let's see, we had... There were about six grad students and the occasional postdoc and the occasional... And every year, we had a research fellow, cardiologist, who was part of the team, right? But on the NASA side, there was usually two or three of us who focused on that. And everybody else was more focused on the cardiology side, the biomedical side.

Phillips:

And then the entire time you're doing your graduate work there, were you only ever a teaching assistant or did you actually, were there opportunities to teach at all?

Blodgett:

Well, this is the thing, at Wash U, you only were a T.A. for typically your first two years.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

You only did a T.A. after that if your research adviser couldn't find any funding.

Phillips:

Gotcha. So you were supported on the NASA money after that.

Blodgett:

Right.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

Right. And my summers, too.

Phillips:

Right.

Blodgett:

And I've got to say that this is really pretty cool of Wash U. They now support all graduate students in all disciplines.

Phillips:

That is awesome.

Blodgett:

Regardless of whether your advisor has a grant.

Phillips:

That's fantastic and not nearly common enough.

Blodgett:

Right. So a few years ago, UW River Falls had our first five-year capital fundraising campaign. We're a state university. We are just lousy traditionally. We're just terrible at fundraising, right? We raised over twenty million dollars and it took us less than five years to do it. We were really excited. Wash U had a five-year capital campaign at that same time too.

Phillips:

And I'm sure they didn't do nearly as well.

Blodgett:

They had 2.3 billion.

Phillips:

Yeah. Must be nice. [Laughs]

Blodgett:

Right. So they got a good endowment, right. [Laughs] So anyway, it was a great place to be a graduate student. As a matter of fact, it was too nice. Remember, the economy wasn't stupendous, right? The average time to Ph.D. in the physics department had crept up over eight years. Well, sometimes that's a signal of bad things happening where the professors are holding on to their slave labor as long as they can. But at Wash U it was like, I'm having fun, why should I leave?

Phillips:

Right.

Blodgett:

So the fact is they actually had a meeting where the department chair said kick them out of the nest. So I did my part. I managed to finish my Ph.D. in a smidge under six years.

Phillips:

Very nice. Were people primarily, and you said the economy, you know, in the eighties, is awful, were people primarily still looking for academic jobs? Were people going to government work?

Blodgett:

And industry.

Phillips:

And industry, of course. Yeah.

Blodgett:

Yeah, they were pretty much, they were looking wherever they could. But they had a good gig at Wash U. You know, living off grad student wages isn't fabulous, but, you know, we had enough.

Phillips:

Yeah.

Blodgett:

And besides, you know, by the time you're a fourth- or fifth-year grad student, you're really getting the hang of things, right? You can really start to do something. And then they kick you out. [Laughs] I never considered... I wasn't keen on the idea of doing a post doc.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

I thought if I did a postdoc, I would want to do a postdoc in something completely different, because that would enhance my marketability.

Phillips:

Of course.

Blodgett:

But as I was getting closer to the end of my grad school and later four years... In the fall, I was a T.A. for Intro Physics and that was fun, but in the spring, I got to be a T.A. for Jim Miller's undergraduate acoustics for med students, medicine.

Phillips:

Oh, interesting.

Blodgett:

OK, and that was great, and I even occasionally went a couple of times, when he had to go to a conference, he let me give the lecture for the day. And this was a lot of fun. And I could see how he prepared his course. I could see how he prepared to do that. And, you know, I looked back at my own undergraduate instructors who had been really, really excellent. Well, you know, maybe I ought to think about teaching as a career option.

Phillips:

Yeah. So is that what you were thinking then? And I know you ended up back at River Falls. So you were looking for a teaching position at that point?

Blodgett:

Well, right. Now, as I was closing in, you know, I've got my thesis defense coming up in the spring and we've got our first child due in January before the thesis defense.

Phillips:

[Laughs]

Blodgett:

So I'm sending out applications and I actually have a job interview at a lab in Ames, Iowa.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

Doing ultrasonic research, continuing that nondestructive evaluation. They had a big group there that I was familiar with. And that was very intriguing. And there was a possibility of a job opening at NASA Langley, but that was pretty vague yet. And I got this message from Curt Larson at River Falls that they were going to have an opening at River Falls probably. But it wasn't going to be a tenure track right away. But he was pretty sure it was going to get converted to tenure track eventually, probably. Well, River Falls is a lot closer to home than Ames, Iowa.

Phillips:

It's true. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Blodgett:

It was a bad thing. Well, River Falls being close is a good thing. Sorry, Ames being far away was a bad thing. So Marguerite and I made the difficult decision to turn down the bird in the hand before I even had an offer at River Falls.

Phillips:

Wow.

Blodgett:

So I got the offer from River Falls, and it was indeed academic staff, so I was on academic staff one-year contracts for three years.

Phillips:

I imagine that was stressful.

Blodgett:

Right. And then they finally got approval to add a seventh tenure track slot. They had six tenure track slots and they needed seven people so I was number seven. And so then I got the tenure track. But I did get to count those three years of my tenure clock.

Phillips:

Oh nice.

Blodgett:

Yes.

Phillips:

I mean, that's good at least. So when you started at River Falls, back again as academic staff, that was your first real experience teaching on your own.

Blodgett:

Yes.

Phillips:

So. Oh, I'm sorry, what were you about to say?

Blodgett:

It was terrifying. Yep, it was exciting. It was terrifying. My colleagues who were pretty much all my former professors were very supportive. But, you know, the standard teaching load of River Falls is twelve credits. You know, so you're teaching full time.

Phillips:

Yeah.

Blodgett:

If you've got labs, that means you might have, you know, fifteen, sixteen contact hours a week in the classroom. There are some terms when I had eighteen contact hours a week because I had lots of labs. That was later on. So this was interesting. They did try and help me by giving me two sections of the same course.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

Right. So it'd be one prep. Just repeat it. And then one upper-level class.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

Because they figure you're fresh out of grad school, you can fumble your way through classical mechanics and you won't damage those students too badly because, you know, they're already juniors and seniors. They, you know, the joke was if they have a particularly bad classical mechanics instructor at River Falls it'll just prepare them for grad school. But actually, we do a pretty good job on our upper-level classes. So I poured myself into it. We couldn't afford a place in River Falls, especially not when my mom and dad said, oh, we're going to do some traveling, you can stay with us. So thus begun my commute of forty-three miles from Boyceville to River Falls.

Phillips:

Wow. Now at this point, your dad had long since gotten rid of the cows. You weren't also responsible for that?

Blodgett:

He passed away a couple of years after that. So he was on the tail end. So that was another nice thing that they gave us. They sold us land at really, really cheap rates, five acres. And we got a federally subsidized loan because it was so low to build the house that I'm sitting in right now. And so we were right across the road so our kids could toddle across to the driveway to see grandma. We were right there when dad passed away. My mom was able to help out with our kids and then we were able to help out with mom. She stayed in the house until she was a hundred and one and a half. She lived a little over 102. And because we were right here, we could do that

Phillips:

Right.

Blodgett:

So lots of cool logical things. Well that's fast forwarding, we were talking about what it was like as a freshman, new physics teacher. I built detailed notes because that's what Jim Miller always had. Jim only had to teach one course a year. Not one class a semester, one course a year. So, yes, he had super detailed notes. And I had super detailed notes. I even wrote down the jokes.

Phillips:

[Laughs] Did that help? Did they to go over well?

Blodgett:

Yes. [Laughs] And I learned how much I could humanely pack into a fifty-minute class.

Phillips:

That's a lesson that some faculty never learn. So, well done.

Blodgett:

[Laughs] And I taught the... We had a physics course, an algebra-based physics course, specifically tailored for the life sciences at that time. And that's the one that I had two sections of. So I taught that every term. We were on the quarter system, right? I taught that every term and in summer session. So in the summer you'd teach a full year of physics in twelve weeks.

Phillips:

Yikes.

Blodgett:

So it was pretty intense.

Phillips:

Yeah.

Blodgett:

Well, by the fourth year, I didn't actually need those detailed notes for that class anymore. [Laughs]

Phillips:

So, they were teaching physics for life science students. You said River Falls is a big ag [agriculture] school. Were these mostly ag students that you were teaching?

Blodgett:

Yes, we have more pre-vet students than we have pre-med students.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

OK. We have a fair number of pre-med students, but not like Wash U. [Laughs] So, the biology majors are all required to take at least one course in physics.

Phillips:

Right.

Blodgett:

Right. So they were the ones who took that. So it was it was interesting, it was entertaining and I enjoyed finding those applications of physics to biology and medicine. So eventually I fought my way into the rotation of teaching the calc-basic intro physics sequence.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

So this is my tip: if you want to be a thriving and successful physics department, you only put experienced people who are really passionate about teaching intro physics in teaching that intro calc-based physics course. So I didn't even get into the rotation until after five years, and then I only got to teach that course once every four years because, you know, there were other people with experience who were in the rotation. [Laughs]

Phillips:

The calc-based, that was for the physics and engineering students?

Blodgett:

Right. Although nowadays they're in the minority because now the biology and especially the pre-med and pre-vet students realize how much better it looks if you took calc-based physics.

Phillips:

That makes sense.

Blodgett:

And the pre-pharmacy students have to.

Phillips:

Oh, interesting.

Blodgett:

Yeah, the U of M which is, you know, the nearest pharmacy school, just over the river, requires it. So now it's a totally different vibe in intro physics now. We're up to about twenty percent of our physics majors are women.

Phillips:

OK, that's...

Blodgett:

It's a hard sell. But in our intro physics classes, it's usually sixty percent women or more.

Phillips:

Right. Other majors.

Blodgett:

Biology majors. But the really cool aspect to this, just randomly bouncing around here. We teach an active learning format now where they work in groups of three, right? And I assign the groups of three and rotate regularly through the semester. Start of first semester, I always make sure that there's no more than one freshman in any group of three.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

And I tell them right at the start, OK, you've only got one freshman in your group because they don't know the ropes of how to be a successful science major. The juniors and seniors might be terrified that they're in a physics class, but you know how to be a successful science major in college. You work together, you help each other, you learn from each other.

Phillips:

That makes sense.

Blodgett:

Yeah. And oftentimes it actually does work out.

Phillips:

I'm curious. It sounds like your teaching has evolved quite a bit and the department has evolved quite a bit, but is this mostly trial and error? Did you sort of, do the other faculty, like, learn and swap pedagogical secrets? What's the...?

Blodgett:

Oh, yes. Lots of swapping, very collegial, very supportive. We would always get together and we would talk and grumble and complain and share ideas. We'd come up with a new idea for an experiment for the intro lab and a couple of us would work on it together to just test drive it in a section. I was oftentimes the one doing that. And, you know, we would periodically as a department, we would get together as a retreat and plan. OK, should we be changing something? Should we be doing something different? Is there an emphasis that we should change? Should we modify one of the options that we've got in our physics major? Right?

And that's always been a process that has been part of the culture of this department, is to work together, to share stories and all that, which makes working during the pandemic really no fun. Because it's really hard to do that. So, yeah, we've involved and we've always been, since the late sixties, putting a real big emphasis on the importance of understanding experimental methods. Sure, a few of our graduates went on to do [gasps] theory.

Phillips:

[Laughs]

Blodgett:

But, you know, we really hammer experimentation. You know, from early on, you had a year of freshman physics, you had at least one sophomore lab course, some years we had more. We require at least one electronics class. We've got three electronics courses that you can take, but one is required. And we require a full year of advanced lab. And it's an intense advanced lab.

It is better than MIT's was twenty years ago, just saying. We visited MIT and we saw, yeah, you got fancy stuff, you got cool toys, but it's turn a knob and follow the instructions. So we didn't have a budget for cool equipment. So we before there was a MacGyver, we taught our students how to be a MacGyver. [Laughs]

Phillips:

Very cool. I'm curious sort of about your experience back at River Falls teaching this versus having been a student there. Was this sort of a new way of doing things after you arrived or was that how it was when you were a student as well?

Blodgett:

It was when I was a student.

Phillips:

Like I said, it was bound to happen. Excuse me. [Cat jumps on desk in front of camera]

Blodgett:

Yep, yep.

Phillips:

Out of the way.

Blodgett:

[Laughs] I'm kind of amazed. This is the time of day that my two elderly cats do tend to nap.

Phillips:

OK. And she just woke up. We made it almost an hour so far before she got on the desk so that's pretty good.

Blodgett:

Right. Now, the department, they had this philosophy of the emphasis on experimentation or working computation in there before I started as an undergraduate. And the whole idea that you should actually talk to each other, that you should support each other, that should work with each other, yeah, that was already in place. We very much... It was exceptionally unusual over the years for any physics course to be canceled because of somebody going to a conference or surgery or something because somebody else would step in and teach that class without getting paid for that. [Laughs] So we just tended to do that as much as we could. Now there are sometimes when somebody gets sick at the last minute and, yeah, nobody can step in. But lab classes never got canceled.

Phillips:

I mean, that's very nice for the students.

Blodgett:

Right.

Phillips:

I'm curious also, I know you've been involved for quite a long time now with national organizations, especially AAPT and SPS. How do you and your colleagues at River Falls, how does your teaching interact with that? What do you what do you get from or bring to, you know, conferences and publications and such on the national scale?

Blodgett:

Well, again, that's something that's evolved over the years because through the seventies, eighties and nineties we didn't have money to do research, we didn't have money to go to conferences. Basically, the only conference we went to was the section meeting for the Wisconsin section of AAPT.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

Because, you know, we host it in years ending in zero.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

Right. Otherwise, it's always in Wisconsin so it's relatively inexpensive to go. So, AAPT, for our department, has always been the major player. Not APS, sorry APS. I've never been a member of APS, so I can make snarky noises. [Laughs]

Phillips:

They know how to reach us if they need to complain.

Blodgett:

Right. So AAPT was for our department the biggest influence. And even though we rarely published anything, we read the American Journal of Physics very faithfully and we follow along. And that's where we got a lot of ideas for new things to incorporate into the intro physics and upper-level classes and intermediate, you know, all the whole gamut. That's what we got a lot of ideas from, was from AAPT, from our section meetings and from reading AJP. So that was really big.

Later on, APS and the optical society became more important to our department because we had reorganizations in our budget that actually gave us a little bit more support to do a little research. Started out real low, but, you know, it was better. And more support for actually going to conferences. OK, so that that's something that evolved over the years. SPS is something that we got into back in 1975. We got a chapter and we got a chapter of Sigma Pi Sigma back then. So that was right before I started as an undergraduate. I am member number twenty-eight of our chapter of Sigma Pi Sigma.

Phillips:

Wow.

Blodgett:

So that's been a part of our department as a thriving department that we always had support for SPS and support for the students because we weren't there to garnish our publication resume. Because, you know, who had time to do publications. We were there for our students. So I've always been very proud of this, that at River Falls, in almost every department, but particularly in the physics department over the decades, we measure our success by the success of our students.

OK, so, very early on, the guys already knew that having a tight bond on the students and getting the students to support each other and work together was how they were being successful. So when they learned about SPS, they said, OK, yeah, we should do this. About that time, we got money from the state for a new science building.

Phillips:

That's exciting.

Blodgett:

Yes, it was very exciting, but they wouldn't let us put in a lounge for the students. We can't spend taxpayer money on a student lounge. So we put in a seminar room for guest speakers to present and for students to present their senior capstone seminars. And, indeed, they do that. But it's got a comfy couch and chairs and tables and a coffee machine and a refrigerator. [Laughs] That's where SPS meets in normal times, and that's where we have our SPS outstanding chapter awards and all this stuff. So the department, even though they had to be devious, has been very supportive of SPS over the years. And the chapter advisor has always been a full professor.

Phillips:

OK, so what were you doing with SPS as an undergrad in the late seventies?

Blodgett:

Well, we would occasionally, you know, go to our planetarium because, you know, as physics majors, we didn't get to see the planetarium so much as the general education students. We would sometimes get to go on a tour of a lab, industry lab or something. The great thing is we'd save up and about every other year, we would have a major field trip. We went on a major field trip to a SPS zone meeting that was hosted by Northern Illinois University. And, as part of that, we stopped off at this relatively new place called Fermilab.

Phillips:

Oh, very exciting.

Blodgett:

Yeah, got to see that. That was really exciting. So we did what we could with very limited means to occasionally do some big field trips. And occasionally we would do an outreach event. But it was a really small part of our activity back then. Now it's a big part of our activity.

Phillips:

Good. That was going to be my sort of follow up. What does a typical River Falls physics major do with SPS now?

Blodgett:

Well, back in the day, we'd meet like once a month. Now we meet every week. I've been an SPS advisor for 24 years now, or I'll finish 24 years at the end of this year. We started having our meetings at noon and we have a cookie company in town, Best Maid Cookies. So I would go over there and I'd buy a bunch of cookies. Everyone would throw in, you know, a dollar and we'd have cookies. And then one of my colleagues, Toni Sauncy, my colleague on the National SPS Council, Toni Sauncy, at her chapter down in Texas, they had a meal with their meetings. So, OK. So we typically have a meal with our meetings. OK, it's usually take takeout pizza because it's cheap, but usually, at least once a semester, we will gear up and do something fancier or we will go crazy and do a semi-potluck.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

OK, if it's totally random potluck, we'll get only chips and soda because, you know, college students. So we do a little bit of coordinating. [Laughs] You're going to bring what? OK. So food is an important part of our bonding process for SPS, except for the last, you know, twelve months.

Phillips:

Right.

Blodgett:

Right. We also put a big emphasis in the last fifteen, twenty years on outreach activities. Either bringing high school students or grade school students onto campus for a science show or sometimes going out there and doing science shows. It's a little hard to coordinate with college students, you know, but it's a lot of fun. For over ten years, we've been supplying the people who run the demos at physics day with the Minnesota Twins.

Phillips:

Oh, fun.

Blodgett:

Right? They bring in like six hundred, seven hundred high school students to do baseball related physics activities before and during the game. So we're outside the stadium before the game, running demo stations. And then we get to go in and they give us a box suite with food for free.

Phillips:

Oh, very nice.

Blodgett:

And watch the game. And, now, in recent years, they've been doing that twice a year. So we have different groups of students that'll do it. Sometimes we even have alumni jump in on that. I'm thinking that's probably not going to happen this spring. It got canceled last spring.

Phillips:

Yeah, yeah. I don't want to necessarily skip straight to the end of the whole narrative here, but I do want to ask while we're on the topic, I guess. Both in terms of academics and in terms of the work with the national organizations, what is the past year been like? How has it affected River Falls? How has it affected your engagement with SPS?

Blodgett:

Well, our engagement with the national organization in the zone is as strong as it has ever been in that you have no excuse not to go to a Zoom meeting. Because, you know, you can go to your zone meeting in your work jammies.

Phillips:

Right.

Blodgett:

OK, so we actually had a zone meeting for chapter leadership that was reasonably well attended. We hosted a zone meeting and we had OK attendance. We did it in conjunction with hosting the sectional meeting of AAPT because it was a year ending in zero.

Phillips:

Right.

Blodgett:

And it was going to get canceled. And I said no. I talked to my SPS students and said, should we host a zone meeting and do it with WAPT? And they said, OK, Dr. B. So as a result, I got elected president of the section again. So, I don't know if you noticed that on my CV. Twenty years ago when we hosted it in 2000, that meant I got elected as section president following that. So I'm section president for next year. So anyway, we hosted it. We had like ninety people who showed up. And we had a disaster with the weather. It was really nice. [Both laugh] So I had like forty high school teachers signed up for the meeting and about half of them showed up.

Phillips:

Oh no. [Laughs]

Blodgett:

OK, so engagement on the national level has been as good as ever. Right. And of course, they've been pumping out ideas and ways to try and keep engaged. But at the local level, oh, it's so hard. Because even though we had some face-to-face classes in the fall, we had occasional bouts where we had to go all virtual because of upticks. And from the middle of November to the end of the semester, everything was virtual. And our student organization had to meet virtually all this year and of course all last spring.

Last spring, it was OK because it was kind of novel and we were in the groove of meeting once a week, so we still had a pretty good turnout at our weekly virtual meetings. It's been really hard this year. Instead of averaging around twenty people, we're lucky to crack ten. Yeah. So, we'll see. It's early in the semester. Maybe when they learn that I'm retiring, I'll start getting more of them to come.

Phillips:

Also, you know, you said you've been fully remote since November. How have you adapted lab classes to this?

Blodgett:

Well, fortunately, this semester our lab classes are still face to face.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

And my lecture classes I'm teaching this semester is hybrid in that the students have the option of meeting me in the room with distancing. It's a room that has a capacity of ninety people, but right now it's got a capacity of sixteen, counting me.

Phillips:

Right.

Blodgett:

But they also can sign in and synchronously participate in the class because I'm live on MS Teams at the same time. Last spring, administration put a big push on us to be asynchronous as much as possible because they thought it would be less stressful for the students. I was ready to retire on the spot before the semester even ended. I will never teach asynchronously again in my life. It is just the worst thing. It's like, is anybody actually out there watching this? [Laughs]

Phillips:

Everything I have heard from both teachers and students. It just, it sounds awful.

Blodgett:

And so we were very creative with labs, you know, where we would send them, oh, here's the data that you would have gotten and we'd send a video of here's the equipment and here's Dr. McCann making measurements. And for Advanced Lab, he actually came up with a formal electric bandgap experiment where he mailed out a package to everybody with some diodes and some batteries and the DMM, and they had to design the experiment from there with, you know, some minimal prompts from him. This was near the end of their full year of advanced lab. And we always claim that if you survive and thrive through a full year of advanced lab, you're ready to step into a research group. Even if you haven't graduated yet. [Laughs] Experimentally, you're good to go. OK, so we did that. But fortunately, so far, last fall we were able to do our labs judiciously face to face as much as we could and some hybrids. I actually am on campus three days a week. And I actually get to see students in the flesh a little bit.

Phillips:

I imagine that's good for both you and them.

Blodgett:

It's wonderfully good for my morale.

Phillips:

Yeah. So now we're going to be completely jumbling the timeline. I just wanted to make sure we got the COVID stuff. But going back to you mentioned that, you know, at some point along the way, you started having additional funding so that you could faculty could start doing research in addition to teaching twelve credits per quarter. So what were you working on? And also, do you bring students in as research assistants?

Blodgett:

Well, we've always had a big emphasis on involving undergraduate students in extended projects. OK. Even back when we didn't have any money to do fancy research that was publishable or anything, we still made-up creative projects for students to work on. So our department required everyone to do a capstone seminar. And given the fact that we had such an emphasis on experimental techniques, our capstone seminars are almost always experimental. Go figure. Train them out to be an experimentalist, what are we going to do for a capstone project? But was anything publishable out of that? Almost never. And that was OK. You didn't need to have publications to get tenure.

Phillips:

Right. A different world.

Blodgett:

You needed to demonstrate continued academic involvement and development. So you can do that by doing a presentation about some lab you came up with at the section meeting of AAPT. OK? All right, so in the mid-nineties, we had this very painful activity called Reach for the Future, where we all on the campus reassess priorities and budgeted and trimmed some positions. One or two programs got eliminated. And then as a result, we all had a little bit more money for supplies and expenses. Right. So we had a little bit more money to buy some toys, and therefore we could be a little bit more adventuresome in the projects that we came up with for our students.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

Still rarely publishable.

Phillips:

Fair.

Blodgett:

Because it still wasn't required. But it was really cool because then we could get more creative with our students and our students can get more creative, so our projects were more entertaining.

Phillips:

Did you think you could maybe mention a memorable example or two of the creative projects that students doing?

Blodgett:

We had a student who was an amateur, well, semi-professional blacksmith.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

And he wanted to come up with a way to quantify the temperature in his forge because it was a homebuilt forge. And so we helped him with, you know, various infrared sensing devices that were available at the time. This is like twenty, over twenty years ago. And so for that semester, we had a blacksmith's forge installed in one of the physics labs.

Phillips:

Very cool.

Blodgett:

We had a student who was keen on jet engines.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

And he and his father had spent years designing and building their own jet engine.

Phillips:

Wow.

Blodgett:

This is probably one of the most awesome senior seminar presentations I can ever remember in thirty-five years. He gave the talk inside, in the seminar room, and then we all trooped outside so he could fire up the thing. [Jet noise] Flames and wild thunder. Fortunately, that was largely self-funded by him and his dad.

Phillips:

Yeah.

Blodgett:

Because there's no way we had a budget for that. But we had enough of a budget so that... OK, when I started teaching in the late eighties, if somebody needed to buy something at the hardware store that was more than twenty dollars, we talked about it at a department meeting first.

Phillips:

Right.

Blodgett:

OK, we don't worry about that anymore. [Laughs] Even though budgets have gone up and down over the years since the nineties.

Phillips:

Right, of course. Yeah. Um, so then, I interrupted you, but you were starting to talk about the new toys that you were able to get with the additional funding in the nineties.

Blodgett:

Right. And then, after this century, after the turn of the century, I just love saying that. [Both laugh] After the turn of the century, we started getting more programs on campus because it wasn't just the physics department that saw the value of these extended projects. And so we actually formed an undergraduate research, scholarly and creative activity program and came up with the acronym URSCA, which other places now use.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

But we were kind of one of the first to ever use it. Might have even been the first, but I'm not sure on that. If I talk to Tim Lyden over in the biology department, he says we're the first. He was the first URSCA director. I'm the latest URSCA director. So we brought a proposal to the student government for an extra fee. This is how you get extra fees approved in the state of Wisconsin. It has to start with the students. And they said, yeah, we'll approve an extra fee. And then it went through the faculty Senate, the chancellor and then the board of regents and all.

So incoming students at River Falls all pay an extra segregated fee aimed at improving instruction. Some of it gets used to make sure that classrooms have the latest tech instructional stuff, but some of it goes into a pot of money to fund extended projects of all disciplines.

Phillips:

Oh wow.

Blodgett:

All disciplines. It's scholarly, it's research, scholarly and creative activity.

Phillips:

Wow.

Blodgett:

So they can write grant proposals. The students can write grant proposals and get some money to buy equipment. Specialized optical filters for your optics table. Money to do specialized genetic testing over at the University of Minnesota so we don't actually have to buy the equipment, we can rent theirs.

Phillips:

Yeah.

Blodgett:

We got a proposal from stage and screen arts that we funded this year, where he's using these grants to fund people to do the, actually be the actors to portray his screenplay that he's written and do the editing and all that.

Phillips:

Wow.

Blodgett:

And we just had the power go out for a minute here.

Phillips:

Oh, exciting.

Blodgett:

Yeah. So I might be on battery power here. And fortunately we do have a generator.

Phillips:

OK good.

Blodgett:

It's just kicked in. Fortunately, I'm running off a hot spot iPhone supplied by the university.

Phillips:

Oh, very nice.

Blodgett:

OK, because my wife... My internet from home is really bad.

Phillips:

Yeah. Are you having, is there a storm or something right now or?

Blodgett:

Yes, we do have a snowstorm going on and the wind is starting to kick up, gusting to thirty-five miles an hour and the temperature is dropping. When I went for my run this morning, it was thirty-one degrees. So it was really, really nice. I got a nice seven mile run and it was just starting to snow. I finished about six am figuring that wind and snow was going to be kicking up later.

Phillips:

Yeah.

Blodgett:

It's going to get twenty below this weekend.

Phillips:

Oof, yeah.

Blodgett:

So anyway, I'm expecting this is related to the snow and the wind and probably somebody skidded off the road into a pole.

Phillips:

Right.

Blodgett:

That's what I'm afraid has probably happened. So anyway, I was telling you about, I was bragging about URSCA at our university because fifty percent of my assignment right now is as URSCA director.

Phillips:

Oh, OK, wow.

Blodgett:

OK, so we award about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year for research grants and travel grants so that students can travel to conferences and actually present or in the case of the arts, perform.

Phillips:

Right. Are these mostly for the senior capstone projects or are they for all students?

Blodgett:

Well, they're for all students. So I always talk to freshmen and say, you can get involved in this right away. You just have to do something terrifying: you have to talk to professors.

Phillips:

It takes them a little while to work up to that.

Blodgett:

Right. Sometimes, indeed, it is a way to get that funding for a senior capstone project or an advanced lab project. But a lot of times it's for an extra project that you're not getting credit for.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

To encourage those sorts of things if you're doing it just for funsies... [cuts out]

Phillips:

Oh.

Blodgett:

...a stipend, actual money in your pocket.

Phillips:

I dropped you for about five seconds in there.

Blodgett:

I'll recap.

Phillips:

Thank you.

Blodgett:

If a student is just doing it for funsies, they can request a stipend.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

Not just S&E, but an actual stipend. I need eight hundred and fifty dollars to buy these widgets and I want a thousand dollars stipend dispersed through the financial aid office.

Phillips:

Wow.

Blodgett:

OK, if you're doing it, if your project is, you're getting academic credit for it, well, that's your reward. You don't get a stipend. But you can get S&E.

Phillips:

Very cool.

Blodgett:

Yep.

Phillips:

And you said that started in the early 2000s?

Blodgett:

Right. So by 2005 or so, it was up and running pretty well. And so it's pretty consistent since then. We continue to emphasize that undergraduate, OK, URSCA is a high impact practice. OK, [that's a] buzz word in education these days, HIPS, high impact practices; it's one of them. And it's something that you don't need money from the URSCA program to do this. You can do it as part of your curriculum. You can do it with a professor just cause. Some professors actually do have outside grants.

Phillips:

Right.

Blodgett:

You know, in the physics department, we've been part of the IceCube collaborations for about twenty years.

Phillips:

Yeah.

Blodgett:

And so we've had students doing research in cosmic ray physics for twenty years. And we've sent probably six or seven students to the South Pole.

Phillips:

Wow. That's, yeah, very cool. So I'm curious... Your work, I mean, right now, fifty percent of your appointment is URSCA. But prior to that, were you still doing acoustics research?

Blodgett:

My professional activity for the past twenty-five years has been SPS. Now, we, actually, I did have a student do a senior project. She was also a McNair scholar and so she got funding from McNair program. She was a double major in physics and music with a minor in Spanish. And she's a percussionist specializing in the marimba. So we did a project on the marimba and studied the interaction of the bar with the resonating tube underneath the bar because just the bar is very quiet. You need to have that resonating tube.

And we got her paper accepted at a meeting of the Acoustical Society, which I've been a member of for a long time. And that was really cool. And so I sent her to the meeting in Cancun and I stayed in River Falls.

Phillips:

At least she got a good experience.

Blodgett:

Right. We did have one publication come out of Advanced Lab.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

It was like this is one of the first years I was teaching Advanced Lab after John Shepherd retired. So back around the turn of the century. And it was a dip in enrollment when we only had three people in Advanced Lab instead of twelve to fifteen. And so we came up with the idea of, oh, we're just going to spend like half the semester on an extended project. Now, we do this as a routine thing because it worked out so well. Because the year before a couple of students had fallen behind and they had begged me to be allowed to take the equipment home to their apartment to take measurements over the weekend, because at that time we couldn't let students in after hours. We can now.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

OK? But this was very slow developing things because back in the sixties, you could let students have access to buildings after hours. And then there was this bomb on a Madison campus in sixty-eight, you know. And it took decades before Madison forgot that. All right. Off track. So anyway, these students, they take the experiment home and it's about forced oscillators using these tuning forks that you can drive electromagnetically, with a little speaker that's surplus from World War Two headsets. And they discovered, much to their dismay, that the frequency of their tuning fork was drastically different at home than it was in the lab.

Our lab room, in our building that opened up my sophomore year, our advanced lab room is quite warm and toasty. These physics majors were exceedingly thrifty and they kept their apartment at fifty-two degrees. The frequency of a tuning fork is temperature dependent.

Phillips:

Right.

Blodgett:

So the next year I had these three students do a half-semester long project investigating, the temperature dependance on a tuning fork. It was published in the Journal of Undergraduate Research in Physics, which is an SPS publication. And I presented it as a talk at an acoustical society meeting in Florida, which was really tricky to find funding to get to because it was really difficult. But that was just when things were changing and you could start to get funding to go to one conference if you were presenting.

Phillips:

OK. Yeah, so that's one thing I've been wanting to ask. You mentioned SPS has been your professional position for a long time. You're a historian for SPS. How did that come about?

Blodgett:

Well, I'd been SPS advisor for less than two years when an opening came up on the National Council for the zone councilor for our region. And the previous zone councilor from UW Platteville, you know, put a bug in my ear saying, hey, this is really fun, you should do this. So I threw my hat in the ring and I got elected and it was a blast.

For one thing, I got to travel somewhere. Because I go to the council meeting and SPS, AIP, would fund the travel to go to the council. And I got to interact with other people outside of Wisconsin. And it was awesome. I had a lot of fun. And I'd bring back these great ideas to share with chapters in the zones and especially my chapter. That was so fun that I decided to run for reelection, so I served my term on it of two consecutive terms as zone councilor. And near the end of that, the SPS president office was coming open. So I said, I can do that. So I ran for SPS president and I got elected for that. And I served my two consecutive terms on that. At that point, I could have run for zone councilor again, but it wasn't the right point in the cycle. And being SPS president was a blast because I got to go to the winter meeting [of AAPT] to present the outstanding Chapter Adviser Award. So I thought, well, OK, I'll have to set off the council for a year, although they always like to keep you involved. This is very much an inheritance from the days when Gary White was SPS director.

I've got an unstable connection here. Once you're on SPS counsel, in Gary White's opinion, you're always still part of the family.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

And Brad Conrad still very much continues that philosophy, you know. And so did Toni Sauncy, right? Yeah. OK, so I figured, well, I'll have to be off of the National Council for a year and then the Sigma Pi Sigma President office would come up and maybe I could go for the, you know, bat for the cycle.

But the historian at the time, Tom Olson, took a job as assistant director of SPS. And they all figured it's not appropriate to be the historian as a paid employee. So there was this opening for historian, and I threw my hat in the ring and told Gary White I'd be interested. And you serve a three-year term at the pleasure of the director and there's no term limits.

Phillips:

Oh, perfect.

Blodgett:

Right. So as long as I don't mess up badly, I can be historian for a while.

Phillips:

So what have you worked on as a historian? I've read, you know, a few things that you've published through SPS over the last few years, but...

Blodgett:

I'll preface my statement by saying not as much as I wanted to. I wanted to have time to do more digging into the records and flesh in more details. I got to meet Peggy Dixon, who was the historian when I first started on council. She wrote kind of the definitive history of Sigma Pi Sigma, the little short booklet, which has been updated a little bit. I helped on the update. But I haven’t been able to dig into the records in the way I wanted to. So that’s one of the things on my “maybe now that I'll be retired” list. But it's being involved in helping keep the records, help keep alive the institutional memory, especially when we have new directors, right? So we got change over in the national office to help remember how we've been doing things, why we did things that way, and why maybe we should try something different. To not be the voice saying, oh, we tried that and it didn't work, don't do it again. But to say, oh, we tried that, it didn't work great, maybe we should tweak it a little and try it again. But to be that kind of a voice. I don't have a fabulous memory for details and dates so, you know, sometimes I have to dig through my documentation. That's why I try and do a really, really good job on taking the minutes of everything.

Phillips:

That's more important than being able to remember everything you write. You can trust the minutes more.

Blodgett:

So typically when the council meets in the fall, a two and a half day meeting, plus the executive committee before and after, I usually finish up the minutes at Washington National Airport. And so oftentimes people, by the time they get home, the minutes are in their inbox.

Phillips:

Very good. One thing that I wanted to ask and I'm a little curious about is one of the things that I read of yours from a couple of years ago now. You're sort of contextualizing the founding of SPS, as you sort of mentioned, with the bombing in Madison in 1968 as this very turbulent, very important year.

Blodgett:

It was 1968. Everything happened in 1968.

Phillips:

Yeah. So, I mean, do you see much of significance as that context for SPS, for student activism either at the time or now? Is it something that...?

Blodgett:

You know, I don't think so. Because that merger was more faculty driven and faculty resisted on both sides. Both APS, and Sigma Pi Sigma. People who are very concerned about joining together and people who are very keen on it are. Worth Seagondollar was very, very important in pushing for that because not only did he have great credibility on the Sigma Pi Sigma side, but he had credibility on the APS side, too.

Phillips:

Right.

Blodgett:

And so he was one of the important voices from everything I've read and from my occasional opportunities to actually meet with him, which is mostly at the 2004 Albuquerque PhysCon. Have you ever watched his talk?

Phillips:

I haven't.

Blodgett:

Oh, man. You've got to watch that talk.

Phillips:

2004 PhysCon.

Blodgett:

Yeah, we've got it recorded. The video of that is recorded and accessible because he reminisces... because we went there and he took us out to the Trinity site.

Phillips:

Oh yeah.

Blodgett:

He's like they open it up to a couple of days a year, but they opened it up special for us because of his experience.

Phillips:

Yeah.

Blodgett:

And he stood there next to the obelisk and told us about watching the test.

Phillips:

Wow.

Blodgett:

So that was awesome. But then in the evening he was the after-dinner speaker and he just riveted the room with his tales as a young physicist working in the Manhattan Project. You've got to watch it.

Phillips:

I will check that out today.

Blodgett:

So, yeah, that's part of the things I want to do as a historian is there are things that I've come across that I know are very exciting and interesting. And I want to make sure that people know about them and find out about them and see those. And get a chance to learn some of those exciting stories.

Phillips:

Yeah. Have you had much of a chance to play around in the archives, at Niels Bohr Library and Archives?

Blodgett:

Again, not nearly as much as I wanted to. It was really awesome. Before the pandemic, I was out there and got to spend like a little over half a day digging through some files, all personal files of... Hey, I got notes on my computer somewhere. One of the early presidents of Sigma Pi Sigma back from like the thirties and forties.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

OK, so that's where Brad Conrad and I got some of our tidbits and juicy bits for some of the articles that he and I coauthored in Radiations [the Sigma Pi Sigma magazine].

Phillips:

Yeah, I hope you get a chance to spend some more time there. It's a fabulous archive to play in.

Blodgett:

Brad has always said he would try and find some money to put me up for a couple of days to come out there and spend some time digging through. Yeah, you've got so much good stuff there.

Phillips:

Um, sorry, I'm just going to move her again,

Blodgett:

I, oh, what am I [thinking]? One of the most fun things I got to do as historian was when y'all hosted the meeting of historians of professional societies. Right. And so we have the historian from IEEE and from the American Chemical Society and yeah, it was a blast. Oh, I definitely felt like the amateur in the room, but it was fun.

Phillips:

I mean, those meetings are always a blast. Well, so I think we've worked our way, pretty much, through the questions I had prepared. But I'm curious if you have anything that, you know, I should have asked or that you wanted to have a chance to talk about that we didn't get to.

Blodgett:

Well, I guess I would say that one of the really cool things that I love about SPS and Sigma Pi Sigma is its focus on the students, focus on particularly undergraduate students. And indeed, you know, the faculty role has been important, the faculty role provides continuity, the faculty role can provide that poke in the ribs to keep things going, but it is inherently and fundamentally a student centered, student run organization. Right? And that goes right back to the founding of Sigma Pi Sigma, where it's a group of students who get together and say, hey, you know that organization, that seems pretty cool. We should do one of those for physics. And it's still going a hundred years later, and growing one hundred years later.

Phillips:

Yeah.

Blodgett:

And our very constitution enshrines this in that our governing body has equal numbers of faculty zone councilors and student associate zone councilors, and they have equal weight and importance. The students have a shorter term. It's a necessity of being a student.

Phillips:

Right.

Blodgett:

So the faculty, you know, to provide a little bit more continuity on the council, and we try and get these students to supply the energy and the ideas. And starting in the early aughts, in my time on the council, we started making conscious and explicit mention of this at the start of every council meeting. That we want to hear from the students in these council meetings. Here's how you can do it. Here's a little primer on Robert's Rules on how to do this. And if the faculty are talking too much, the president, whichever president has the gavel, SPS or Sigma Pi Sigma, whoever's got the gavel will squash the faculty if they are talking too much. [Laughs]

Phillips:

And do you see that happen frequently?

Blodgett:

No, I did it a couple of times when I was president. [Laughs] But if you do that, then there's enough continuity among the faculty that it becomes part of the culture. When we break up into committees, which is also something that we started doing after I started on council, because they realized that you can’t just get everything done in three days, that you needed to have committees that would work together. And with Gary White's leadership, we started having committees that would have co-chairs where a student would be a co-chair.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

So that, I think, is something I'm really proud of, that we still have retained and even enhanced that focus on the students.

Phillips:

Yeah, that is fantastic.

Blodgett:

So, it's what we do at my own institution, and it's what I like to see SPS being a difference maker at other institutions. And, you know, you get those anecdotal stories from people where they say, yeah, it's SPS that got departments to start doing things a little differently. It's SPS that got departments to start realizing, oh my gosh, you can do something with a physics major besides go to grad school. The Hidden Physicists Initiative.

Phillips:

Yeah.

Blodgett:

That started when I first started on council. And to recognize that, yeah, all these people who are trained in physics and did not get a Physics PhD, did not go into academia, and you know what? You should stay in contact with them. You should value them because they probably made more money than your alumni who went into academia. You know, just saying as someone who in academia. [Both laugh]

Phillips:

That's very true. I just wanted to clarify. Now, you're planning on sticking around as a historian for at least, you know, maybe a few more terms even after you retired.

Blodgett:

Well, I've got two more years left on my current term, and right now I have no intention of retiring from historian at the end of that time. If I haven't screwed up or, you know, if something, you know, plans can change.

Phillips:

Of course.

Blodgett:

My plan was not to retire until 2024. Plans changed.

Phillips:

Yeah.

Blodgett:

The pandemic kind of weaned me off of my dependance on interacting with students heavily. My wife has realized that she enjoys having me underfoot.

Phillips:

OK, I mean, that's convenient for both of you.

Blodgett:

And we ran the numbers and my take-home pay will go up a little when I retire.

Phillips:

Wow. OK, those are some pretty compelling reasons.

Blodgett:

And, I verified with the National Science Foundation that the emeriti professors can continue to be principal investigators. I've got an NSF grant that I'm P.I. on. That's the director of STEM Teach graduate program.

Phillips:

Oh yes.

Blodgett:

So I can retire and still continue as P.I. and still continue directing this graduate program, which is pretty cool, but that's another whole story.

Phillips:

Well, yeah, that's fantastic. Well thank you so much for doing this interview.

Blodgett:

You're welcome.

Phillips:

I'm really glad we got a chance to talk. Maybe when, post pandemic, you make it to College Park to hit the archives, you know, let me know that you're on the way and we can say hi.

Blodgett:

Well, tentatively, we're hoping to have the SPS Council meet at ACP next September.

Phillips:

Oh, fantastic.

Blodgett:

We hope.

Phillips:

Yeah.

Blodgett:

[Laughs] And we always go on a tour upstairs. But, you know, I might see if I can come out early.

Phillips:

Yeah, well, if you get the tour this time, they've just completely redone the archives vault, so it's all new and fancy.

Blodgett:

Oh, man. OK, cool. Yeah, we got the tour of the vault last time we were there face to face.

Phillips:

New and improved, recently.

Blodgett:

Nineteen?

Phillips:

OK, so I think the vault renovation hadn't started yet then, I think.

Blodgett:

OK. There was all the Star Wars trash compactor story.

Phillips:

Yes.

Blodgett:

Oh no, we lost another story crushed in the stacks.

Phillips:

Yeah. I did my master's degree and PhD work at universities that had those in the library and they always terrified me.

Blodgett:

[Laughs]

Phillips:

They theoretically have pressure plates under the carpet so that, you know, it won't close on you if you're standing in the aisles. I don't trust it.

Blodgett:

I don't blame you. [Laughs] I would bring along a stick, you know. Yeah, well, we really didn't get into talking about what I did with preparing future physics teachers, high school physics teachers. I don't know if you're interested in that or not.

Phillips:

No, we should actually. Do you mind if we take a five-minute break?

Blodgett:

That's fine with me.

Phillips:

OK, let me...

Blodgett:

I need a drink of water because I've been talking your ear off.

Phillips:

Yeah, and I've been sitting here drinking water the whole time, so I need to...

[break]

Blodgett:

OK, River Falls was founded as a normal school.

Phillips:

Oh, I didn't know that.

Blodgett:

Right. 1876. 1875, sorry. It started in the fall of 1875. So its whole mission was preparing teachers. And it wasn't until the twenties that we started branching out into other things. And we got a physics major in 1936, and there was still pretty big emphasis on preparing physics teachers at that time.

So, my undergraduate advisor also got his degree at River Falls, and he was licensed to teach high school physics but he decided to try grad school at Case Western Reserve, got a Ph.D. and came back and was the first Ph.D. physicist to teach at River Falls.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

So he was my mentor, my advisor, and then my colleague when I got back. So in the mid-eighties, high school physics teaching in Wisconsin was, well, like many places, was in a bit of a crisis. That a lot of schools wanted to offer physics, but they didn't have anyone who could teach it. So, all too often. [Cat jumps onto lap] This is Joshua. All too often you'd have the situation where the principal would come up to the biology teacher and say, hey, you had to take a physics course once, guess what you're teaching next year on an emergency license. How are they going to get actually a legit license? Because there are limits on how many years you can teach a subject on an emergency license.

Phillips:

Right.

Blodgett:

So Curt Larson and Neil Prochnow got an NSF grant to start a summer program where in three intense summers you can take somebody who had only a year of algebra-based physics and get them up to where they were actually a rock-solid high school physics teacher in content and pedagogy.

Phillips:

Wow.

Blodgett:

And, over the years, that program licensed over 150 people. And I started getting in on the tail end of that. You know, after we ran out of NSF money, we got other grants.

Phillips:

Right.

Blodgett:

And so for many, many years, I've been one of the people teaching those summer courses for teachers. And about ten years ago, we were a victim of our own success. The demand fell off the table, because like over ninety percent of the high schools in Wisconsin had somebody on staff who was actually licensed to teach physics. This is a good thing.

Phillips:

Yeah.

Blodgett:

I think this is also why UW River Falls has over one hundred physics majors. UW-La Crosse, UW-Eau Claire. All here in northwestern Wisconsin. We're perennially in the top twenty in terms of number of physics graduates per year for bachelors. You know, I pay a lot of attention to the statistics, the AP statistic results. So we've dwindled that program. We still offer a course or two every summer for professional development for folks, but we no longer offer a master's in education.

I got into it because back in the early nineties I was advising students who are going to be a high school physics teacher or who were going to be a biology teacher and they were doing the broad field science degree. And so for about 20 years, I was director of the broad field science programs. So I'm still involved in redesigning the science education curriculum whenever the state changes the rules. They're changing the rules, we're redesigning the curriculum.

But, a handful of years ago, a colleague from the College of Education, Jeff Sherman, and I went down to Texas to learn more about the UTeach model for preparing STEM teachers, OK? Where they redesigned the pedagogy classes to really streamline them and dovetail them so that you could actually do an ordinary science or math degree, science major, and still get your teaching license in four years.

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

We thought this is really cool and really expensive to implement. We brought it back, people in the science departments thought it was cool, people in the College of Education thought it was cool, but we just didn't have the money to do it.

So I had a crazy idea. What if we did it as a post baccalaureate program aimed at career changers and late deciders?

Phillips:

Right.

Blodgett:

OK, well, hey we could maybe do that. And we wrote a grant to the National Science Foundation under the Noyce program to get a capacity building grant, which gave us funding for two years to pay the UTeach Institute to work with us to help adapt all their classes to be graduate classes for career changers and late deciders and get all everything all set up and start our first cohort of graduate students in the STEM teach program. And that's how I became the director.

And then we wrote another grant so that we could actually, starting with our fourth cohort, I believe, offer them stipends.

Phillips:

Oh, nice.

Blodgett:

So that it's almost free. Oh. [paper rustling]

Phillips:

I know this is obviously tailored towards Wisconsin teaching licenses and those requirements. Do you deal with out-of-state students at all? I mean, there are a number of states with really dramatic science teacher shortages.

Blodgett:

Have you checked the map for where River Falls is?

Phillips:

Uh, actually, no.

Blodgett:

OK, well I can kind of show it to you. [Holds up right hand, palm facing camera, and points to juncture of thumb and palm] Here's Green Bay, everyone knows with Green Bay is.

Phillips:

Right.

Blodgett:

Here's Minneapolis, St. Paul. Here's River Falls. [Points to spot on the far outer edge of the palm below the base of the pinky]

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

Roughly half of our students are Minnesotans

Phillips:

OK.

Blodgett:

A significant fraction of our faculty live in Minnesota.

Phillips:

Gotcha, yeah.

Blodgett:

OK, so, yeah, like half of our graduates are going to want to find a job in Minnesota. We offer Wisconsin license because it says UW in front of our River Falls, not UM. But we do pay attention to the regulations for Minnesota to make it as easy as possible for them to take the Wisconsin license and very quickly get their Minnesota license.

Actually, it's quite portable. And we've had inquiries from a couple of different states to get copies of how we did this, how we do the curriculum, how we set it all up. They start classes in the summer, they take two courses in the summer where they do teaching experiences within their first... On their fourth of class, they're doing a teaching experience with some grade school kids.

Phillips:

Wow.

Blodgett:

OK, under the mentorship of an expert, grade school teacher. In the fall, they have four courses and part of this involves a four-and-a-half-week-long immersion in a middle school where they're working in pairs with an ace middle school teacher and they work up to where they get to teach some of the lessons. And then in the spring, they do one course during the January interim, primarily online. But it's cool because by then they all know each other extremely well.

Phillips:

Right.

Blodgett:

Right? Because it's a cohort. We own them. And then in the spring they do their apprentice teaching and a seminar course. So at the end of this, they've earned twenty-four graduate credits towards an MSE and they earn their license in their appropriate field. And they're really close to earning a master's degree. Before we set this up, we surveyed a bunch of administrators and they said, you know, we really don't want to hire a rookie with a master's degree, but we really love to hire a rookie who's pretty close to a master's degree.

Phillips:

Interesting.

Blodgett:

Right. So we now help them. We have an induction support course that they can take for graduate credit their first year of teaching where they meet with our master teacher, Dr. Rachelle Haroldson, once a week and their colleagues, and they continue looking at pedagogy and studying that. And also, oh, crap, this happened this week, what do I do now? So they can earn another, over the course of the year, they can earn another three credits towards their master's degree. So, we've got five to seven people all lined up to finish their masters of secondary education this spring and summer, which is pretty exciting.

Phillips:

That is awesome. I'm curious, did the administrators who said that they didn't want someone, a rookie with masters in hand, but maybe with most of a masters, was that primarily for reasons of salary or what was the reasoning for that?

Blodgett:

Yes, yes. A lot of it the reason was salary, which changed a little thanks to our previous governor. But still, most districts still do offer more for someone who's got a master's degree in their field.

Phillips:

That, what you just said, also raises the question that I was thinking about, wasn't sure if I wanted to ask it or not. But speaking of your previous governor, I know that there were issues with the university system. Did River Falls weather that relatively well?

Blodgett:

It was painful. I mean, over the years, there have been a number of years where I had zero percent pay raises, but there were some years where we had zero percent pay raises and we also had to take furlough days. [Laughs]

Phillips:

Yeah.

Blodgett:

So, we weathered it. At River Falls, our administration has traditionally been fiscally conservative, which has its downsides. But, on the other hand, during the current financial crunch related to COVID, yeah, there were belt tightening things that we had to do that were painful.

Phillips:

Right.

Blodgett:

But we went into it in better shape than many of our sister institutions. And so we're currently in better shape than many of our sister institutions. So, I would like to have had, you know, more raises over the years, of course.

Phillips:

Right.

Blodgett:

But that's usually not in the hands of our administration, that's usually done in Madison. So it did, though, make it really hard on recruiting people both for our traditional undergraduate education programs, which we still have, and our STEM Teach program, because there was this perception that people don't respect high school teachers. That's the vibe they got from the government. And people don’t want to pay high school teachers. So, you know, I'm a Step-Up champion, you know, to get out the facts. I was Step-Up champion [a program for getting more women to major in physics] and a Get Out the Facts champion [a program to get more people into STEM teaching] to try and get more women involved in physics and get out the facts. To say, hey, you know, high school physics teaching doesn't pay as much as the industry maybe, but it's still actually pays very well. The compensation is pretty good, and you'll probably retire before I did. [Laughs]

Phillips:

Have you noticed, has there been much of an improvement over the last couple of years in the perception of...?

Blodgett:

A little bit. Yeah, the effort is working a little bit. And some of this is working on my colleagues in the various science departments. I don't have to work on the math department. We have a really strong undergraduate math education program. They're all on board. So that's great. But, you know, some of the science colleagues are still thinking that a lot of high school teachers who don't make any money. Yeah, they do. Of course, that's one of the things as a champion, we're not supposed to lead with anything negative, we're supposed to lead with the positives. So I have to retrain myself on that.

So, for UTeach we usually hope for a cohort of twelve to fourteen people. And we're delighted if we get ten. But they're really awesome and they're doing great stuff, so that's always very exciting. It is really rewarding when you get a career changer who just wasn't very happy with what they were doing and then as a result of going through this program, now they get into a classroom and they say, ah, this is where I belong.

Phillips:

Some people who did that in Washington state, the program at UW was not as, at that UW, was not as comprehensive or maybe well thought through as yours, but they still loved it.

Blodgett:

Yeah, good, good. One of my former advisees teaches high school physics in, oh gosh, it's the most famous suburb of Seattle because you got Amazon and Microsoft headquarters.

Phillips:

Bellevue? Redmond?

Blodgett:

Redmond.

Phillips:

Redmond.

Blodgett:

[Laughs] So she moved from Wisconsin out there. Yeah, we're seeing some improvement in attitudes about teaching as a career. But it's a long haul. So that's why I'd like to keep working on that a little bit even after I retire.

Phillips:

Well, I imagine at River Falls, that your history as a normal school would certainly, you'd think the country would be amenable.

Blodgett:

It's kind of ancient history, though. [Laughs]

Phillips:

I guess that's true. Still though. Yeah.

Blodgett:

One of the cool things is that we do have good collegial relationships between the College of Education and the College of Arts and Sciences. I've come to realize largely through my interactions with other people, through SPS, that this is not the case everywhere. So it's really nice to actually be on very good terms with our colleagues in the College of Education.

Phillips:

Do you work closely with the faculty there as part of the STEM Teach program?

Blodgett:

Yes, the dean of the College of Education is a co-P.I.

Phillips:

OK, very cool.

Blodgett:

Except he just retired. So we've got to decide if we're going to replace him as co-P.I.

Phillips:

But if he's emeritus, he can be P.I still.

Blodgett:

He's drawing the line. He's one of the few people who had been at River Falls for longer than me.

Phillips:

OK, gotcha.

Blodgett:

Yeah, but as administration, he did not get to be faculty Marshall at commencement. The Marshall is somebody who's been there a long time and you get to lead the procession in carrying the ceremonial carved wooden mace and thump it on the ground. it's a blast, let me tell you. [Laughs]

Phillips:

Do you get to keep the mace while you're Marshall?

Blodgett:

[Laughs] I'll ask. It goes back into storage.

Phillips:

That seems like a waste.

Blodgett:

It was really fun. I live on a farm. We have a lot of forest. We heat with wood; I do lot of splitting of wood. When I thump the mace on the platform, you can hear it. So we're marching out and the chancellor is right behind me because, you know, I'm leading the line and he speeds up and leans over and he says, I thought we were going to have to implement a “you break it, you buy it” policy.

Phillips:

For the mace or for the stage? [Both Laugh]

Blodgett:

I used physics, I used acoustics. It's a portable stage, right? It's in segments. Four foot by four-foot segments.

Phillips:

OK, so you avoid the seams?

Blodgett:

I know where to drum it. I hit it right in the center and I leaned out so that I wasn't standing on the drumhead when I was pounding.

Phillips:

Nice. So you are a drummer at heart. You know, as loud as possible.

Blodgett:

Well, as loud as possible but I can't keep the beat. [Laughs] I'm a brass player.

Phillips:

What did you play?

Blodgett:

Trumpet and baritone.

Phillips:

OK, I played trombone.

Blodgett:

Oh, nice. Nice. And I played penny whistle, but not very well.

Phillips:

That's fun too.

Blodgett:

On a trip to Scotland, vacation to Scotland with my wife, we bought a chanter. [Holds a bagpipe chanter up to the camera]

Phillips:

Very nice

Blodgett:

So I could try and learn how to play bagpipes and [bagpipe blow] it sounds terrible.

Phillips:

Having to use your breath to do it makes it harder, I think. If you have the actual bag, at least the reed vibrates.

Blodgett:

So one of the things that we traditionally do at our SPS meeting is I would usually do a demo at every SPS meeting because I'm a demo person that are in our department pretty much. Maybe a demo that even the seniors haven't seen because he has been out of circulation for four years. Well, last spring we continue trying to do demos, and last fall, we continued to try to do demos virtually. So one of the demos I did virtually... [Bends around and picks up a large plastic trash bag from the floor]

Phillips:

Oh wow.

Blodgett:

...was garbage bag bagpipes. [Blows air to inflate the bag and get a bagpipe sound]

Phillips:

So that's a recorder?

Blodgett:

I've got recorders. I've got one for the chanter and one for the drone.

Phillips:

Yeah. Oh, wow, that is fantastic.

Blodgett:

Oh dear, now I'm totally light headed. [Laughs] That's because I'm a brass player and I haven't. Yeah. Mastering the bagpipes is going to be a really big challenge.

Phillips:

Well, fortunately, you live on a farm, so there aren’t too many people to complain.

Blodgett:

Yup. The nearest dairy herd is over a mile away now.

Phillips:

Excellent. Well, again, thank you. This has been a really wonderful conversation and I'm very glad we did this.

Blodgett:

I had fun. [Laughs] And if you need any clarification on anything or you think of some topic that we might have missed; you know how to get in touch with me.