david:

If you could impress one thing on young people today, what would it be?

That adults are not all they’re cracked up to be. And most of them are wrong most of the time. This can be quite revelatory for a kid - often launching them on a personal quest of exploration, rather than of Q&A sessions with their parents.

If you could change one thing about how the sciences are taught to American children, what would it be?

Create a goal state for educational pipeline to see in broad daylight - some ambitious mission - like a voyage to mars - that is so compelling that the quality of your science teacher is irrelevant. Your consequent ambitions trump all other forces.

Maybe my favorite:

There are street artists. Street musicians. Street actors. But there are no street physicists. A little known secret is that a physicist is one of the most employable people in the marketplace - a physicist is a trained problem solver. How many times have you heard a person in a workplace say, “I wasn’t trained for this!” That’s an impossible reaction from a physicist, who would say, instead, “Cool. A problem I’ve never seen before. Let’s see how I can figure out how to solve it!”. Oh, and, have fun along the way.