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
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Category: Classroom Stories
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By Stacy Palen Recently, my students worked on the “Working with Kepler’s Laws” activity from the Learning Astronomy by Doing Astronomy workbook. In this activity, students learn about ellipses, consider the “simple” version of Kepler’s second law (a planet travels faster when nearer to the Sun and slower when farther away), and run some numbers…
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By Stacy Palen Here’s the thing: all students have a calculator in their phone. And for a long time, I've thought, “They should use the calculator in their phone so they know how to use the calculator in their phone!” But here’s the other thing: a lot of those calculators are terrible. They don’t all…
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By Stacy Palen Last week, we continued our struggle with the lack of AV equipment in our temporary teaching space. In order to teach the seasons in this space, I rewrote an old activity that used an overhead projector and a piece of cardboard with a hole cut out to help students understand why the angle…
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By Stacy Palen In my family, we have a saying, “This will have been a good time.” We use it to refer to upcoming events that will be stressful and potentially awful, but that we will remember fondly once they have passed. For example, when my snake-phobic husband and I went to the Amazon: he…
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By Stacy Palen In my other life, I train horses and riders. This means that I routinely deal with actual life-threatening situations like runaway horses and bad falls. Even non-life-threatening situations such as broken bones, giant bruises, bumps, cuts, and scrapes can seem routine to me but be scary for others. Because of this background,…
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Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia, University of Basque Country/JHU By Stacy Palen I was poking around, looking for something completely different when I came across this nice little vignette from "Physics Today" published in 20061. It’s the story of the discovery of dark matter, told by Vera Rubin herself. The story is mostly…
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B.O'Kane / Alamy Stock Photo By Stacy Palen This week in Physics Seminar, we had a psychologist come and talk to us about a number of studies that indicate how stereotypes impact the performance of underrepresented groups. Generally, this refers to women and minorities (although other categories also intersect). The take-home message is that when underrepresented…
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Credit:Tony Tallec / Alamy Stock Photo By Stacy Palen Here in August, just as we are getting ready to go back to school, this Teen Vogue article that came across my desk was a useful reminder that people care deeply about their names. I have a name that is not very hard to pronounce, but…
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Credit: Vadym Drobot / Alamy Stock Photo By Stacy Palen Everyone has their favorite sky maps, planispheres, and apps. I am no exception! Here are two resources that I go back to again and again as I prepare for class or for observing sessions. Sky Maps is my favorite source for star charts. The star…
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By Stacy Palen Establishing a classroom culture of intention (including routing attendance, handing things in on time, showing up promptly, and so on) starts on the very first day. Students take their cues from me: is this a professor who cares about these things or not? Because of this, I have always avoided missing the…
Teaching Astronomy by Doing Astronomy 