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 didn’t enjoy the trip while it was happening, but afterwards, he was glad to have experienced it. The whole time we were planning the trip, we kept repeating, “This will have been a good time.”
For years, I have taught Introductory Astronomy in the planetarium. This is a difficult space to work in because the chairs are comfy, the light levels are low, the board and projector space is limited, and working in groups of three or more is really difficult. The chairs don’t turn; the students have those little desks that lift out of the chair arm for them to write on; and it is almost impossible to get in and out of a row in the middle of class. If I want to access the computer, I have to go to the back of the room. It’s awkward, but I got used to it, and I figured out how to do both active learning and lecturing, even in this difficult space.
This semester, the planetarium building is being renovated so that we will have heating and cooling that actually work. That’s the plan, anyway. Don’t ask me why they couldn’t do this renovation over the summer. Figuring out the decisions of Facilities Management is above my pay grade!
My astronomy class has been moved into a “portable”—a double-wide trailer in the parking lot, which was furnished the day before classes started. The layout of the classroom is awkward, with students facing perpendicular to the long axis, and the computer being stationed in one corner. It’s like teaching in a hallway. The first week of class, none of the A/V equipment was working, so there were no projectors. During the second week of class, some of the A/V equipment worked, but intermittently—something about the HDMI cables, aspect ratios, and temporary equipment being incompatible with the University standards. I don’t expect this system to be stable for at least another week or two. I could complain about this (more!), or I could see it as an “opportunity” to try something new.
So now, I have jettisoned my long-time methods and materials, and I’m experimenting. I’ve reorganized the whole class to involve lots of mini-activities that can be done quickly in larger-than-usual groups, with lots and lots of peer instruction. For my students, there is really no choice but to read the textbook before they come to class, because it’s really not possible for me to lecture at all.
Today, we’ll negotiate the “points” restructuring, and my students will get to have a say in how much weight each component will have in their final grade. Now that we’ve done a few of the longer activities from Learning Astronomy by Doing Astronomy, a few homework assignments, and a few of the mini-activities, my students have a better sense of how much value each component should have. I’ve explained the experimental nature of what we are doing, and they are mostly cheerful about it.
This entire situation has got me going back and resurrecting things that I did a long time ago, such as using parts of Understanding Our Universe and Learning Astronomy by Doing Astronomy in ways that I haven’t before (it never occurred to me to tear the activities apart and do them over multiple days), seeking out new ideas and activities, and oh … let’s call it “innovating” … at breakneck speed. I expect a lot of this to be a mess, some of it to be useful in the long haul, and some of it to appear in future textbooks. It’s definitely a situation that “will have been a good time.”