Is there something like the American Association of History Teachers that could hold joint meetings or help organize panels for the AHA? I ask because the American Association of Physics Teachers, for obvious reasons, has strong overlap with the American Physical Society so that we do have good sessions on research-based teaching and learning of science. We do have the occasional clunker talk, but most of the talks are practical things that can be used in the classroom that are shown to be effective under certain conditions with data to support them or negative results of things that were effective with one student population, but are not effective with other student populations.
The AAPT is having their winter (Feb.) meeting at the same time and in the same place as the APS April meeting. Yes. The APS April meeting is in February. Why? Who knows. At least they make fun of themselves in the promotional literature.
If you read closely, the April Meeting of the APS and the Winter Meeting of the AAPT were purposely moved this year so that they could hold a joint meeting that would also overlap with the conferences being held by the National Society of Black Physicists and the National Society of Hispanic Physicists. That way people could travel for any of the four conferences, stay the week in D.C., attend some great workshops on the weekend, and then see some good sessions spanning the range of topics from science research areas usually presented at the April Meeting to education research from AAPT, which would also include the special focuses of the minority groups on the difficulty in recruiting and retaining students from certain backgrounds.
It's actually pretty competitive to get a talk at an AAPT conference. Without data, or at least the appearance of data, then there is little chance you'll end up with a talk. Very few (one or two slip by) talks consist of "here's my syllabus. Ain't it cool?" The APS is different. EVERYONE gets a talk or a poster.
February will be my first national AAPT meeting because I usually go to the March APS Meeting so that the APS rules for abstract acceptance apply. However, at least in our regional section of AAPT, everyone who submits an abstract by the deadline gets to talk so the results are interesting, to say the least.
I've never even seen the interview section at the APS meetings. I've never even heard of a department doing interviews at the APS. They certainly don't rely on job candidates to keep seats filled. I'm wondering if polly_mer is right about the AHA learning something from the APS.
I hope so. While I know that interviews are conducted at APS meetings, I don't know of academic positions that are filled that way. I don't even know of too many industrial or government positions filled that way. Some of the big research schools have information booths at the job fair, but I don't know that they even do formal post-doc or research scientist interviews during the meeting. I know that some PI's have interviewed postdocs by prior arrangement to save travel expenses when both parties were already planning to attend, but even the interviews arranged through the APS job site are nothing like the pit shown for AHA. The draws are the fantastic sessions, useful workshops, great plenary sessions, and the arrangement of large gathering areas filled with tables to facilitate discussions among small groups of people.
I don't personally know a single person who got a job by interviewing at an APS meeting, although I usually do read through the postings just in case I see something good. I do know lots of people who picked up new collaborators or whose next proposal was funded because of the opportunity to talk with the right people from NSF and other funding agencies to get the inside scoop on the rubrics used for evaluation or timely submission to the proper committee. But job interviews are not the reason that people go to APS meetings.
