Meera Chandrasekhar is scheduled to give a speech on optics Oct. 28 as one of three finalists in line for the 2014 Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching.

Six hundred teachers across the nation applied for the award. Chandrasekhar, as one of the finalists, has the chance to receive a reward of $250,000, a year of teaching at Baylor University, a fully furnished and all-expenses-paid apartment and $25,000 for her department’s research.

“It’s a great honor to get to this stage, and I think it is great when one has a chance to talk about teaching in a university setting and really ask ourselves, ‘okay, let’s really think about how we are teaching stuff,’” Chandrasekhar said.

Chandrasekhar, a professor of physics, practiced her speech Saturday at Monsanto Auditorium in the Life Sciences Center.

The speech, entitled “Blind to Polarization: What Humans Cannot See,” discusses the polarization of light.

When she was in elementary school, Chandrasekhar developed an early understanding of polarization, even though she did not realize it yet.

“One day, after it had rained, I looked at a rainbow through my mother’s sunglasses,” she said in her speech. “Everything else looked dark, but the rainbow looking incredibly bright. It wasn’t until years later that I realized that my mother had polarized sunglasses.”

Chandrasekhar received a bachelor of science in physics and mathematics from MGM College, Mysore University in India, and continued on to receive a master’s degree in physics from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras.

After moving to the U.S., she had to repeat her master’s degree at Brown University. In 1976, she received a doctorate in physics from Brown University.

She came to MU as a teacher in 1978 and is a now professor of physics.

While speeches about polarization might seem confusing to the general audience, Chandrasekhar said she wanted to make sure the general audience could understand the topic at hand.

She looked into a more obscure topic to give the audience a new perspective on what it uses everyday.

“I wanted to choose a topic that was not so well known, that was used a lot but people didn’t realize,” she said. “I thought that polarization would be fun to talk about.”

As years passed, Chandrasekhar became more involved in the aspect of good and proper teaching. Most things are tried while teaching, and some things work, while others may not, Chandrasekhar said.

“One of the things that did change me, about 20 years ago, I was really interested in getting kids interested in science,” she said.

Chandrasekhar’s “driving force” is her three daughters and their interest in science.

“I later found that the National Science Foundation had a grant program to get girls interested in science, and this became a turning point for me in teaching differently,” she said.

As she continued teaching, she wanted to ensure that children were given all the answers they want to the questions they have about the world and beyond.

“While physics mainly consists of demonstrations and labs, there are never really cases of teachers presenting an everyday object,” Chandrasekhar said. “I wanted to make this a major part of the way I teach.”