recent posts
- Hello, World!
- At Play in the Classroom for Thirty-Five Years: Recollections and Recommendations for Keeping Our Spirits—and Our Students—Soaring
- Reaching every student in your General Education class
- Classroom Stories: Teaching Astronomy to Primarily Non-science Students in Group-setting Activities, by Sandi Brenner (Bryant University)
- JWST Carina Nebula
about
Category: Classroom Stories
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Scott Hildreth is Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Chabot College, retiring from the full-time faculty next spring after 35 years. He’s worked with NASA on numerous projects, from writing about the first images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990, to analyzing the latest pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope. He worked…
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Stacy PalenImage Credit: Zac Williams I know just how difficult it can be to stand in front of a large classroom of diverse students — most there just to fulfill a credit requirement—and wonder how you will facilitate their learning. My college, Weber State University in Utah, is an open enrollment institution that provides accessible…
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Over the past few years, major events have brought into the spotlight the injustices some face in their everyday lives. Unfortunately, the world of academia offers no exemptions. Every student differs when it comes to factors like race, age, gender and gender expression, socio-economic status, technology access, and food security. In the introductory astronomy classroom, our…
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By Michael Dunham (State University of New York at Fredonia) When I first started teaching my Astro 101 course, one of the concepts that I struggled to properly convey to students was the immense change of scale in our Solar System between the spacing of the terrestrial planets and the giant planets. Simply giving the…
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By Stacy Palen This year, in particular, feels like a year in which we might be able to move the needle a little bit on the public understanding of climate change. The effects are starting to capture the attention of ordinary citizens who are infinitely distracted by…everything. Between the fires in the West, the extreme…
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By Stacy Palen Over the last year or so, there have been a number of extraordinary images of astronomical objects with an overlay of magnetic fields in the news. One of these, from the Event Horizon Telescope, has caught extra attention, but Sofia’s HAWC+ imager has also been capturing polarization in the far-infrared. And, of…
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By Stacy Palen You may have noticed that, by now, we have acquired quite an enormous catalog of materials for teaching astronomy. There are so many different pieces, in fact, that even I sometimes find them overwhelming or forget that I did something! I find it useful, then, to pick a couple of topics to…
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By Stacy Palen I love the moment when my attention turns from the current semester to the next one. I love the feeling that I’ve turned the page and that the new course will start fresh, with no mistakes in it. And I love looking back at the semester, as though it were a research…
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By Stacy Palen I’ve been talking to a lot of people about the transition to online instruction. Most of these conversations have been with people who are not academics and who seem to have the idea that I sit around eating bonbons and drinking bourbon in the afternoon now that I don’t have to “actually”…
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By Ana Larson Ana Larson, co-author of the Learning Astronomy by Doing Astronomy workbook, gives us one last post about how to reduce cheating in online courses. To discourage academic cheating at the start of each quarter of my online courses at Seattle Central College, I started with an assignment where students had to complete a…
Teaching Astronomy by Doing Astronomy 