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AAS - 2011

The Winter American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting is the largest meeting of professional astronomers in the world. NITARP educators attend an AAS first to meet their team, then they go home and work remotely for much of the year, and then attend an AAS to present their results.  At any given AAS, then, we could have two NITARP classes attending - those finishing up, and those getting started. Reload to see a different set of quotes.

The 2010 and 2011 NITARP teams attended the 2011 January AAS meeting in Seattle, WA. The 2010 class was presenting results and the 2011 class was starting up. Special feature article on AAS attendees!  There were nearly 60 NITARP-affiliated folks, about 2% of the attendees at the AAS meeting!! We presented 9 posters. Also see Luisa's blog entry about this.

 

Quotes

  • I think it also was an invaluable experience for [my students] to see that it is "ok" to ask questions.
  • There was purpose to my wandering [this year]. Last year was logistically and culturally educational, this year was truly informative. I felt much less out of place.
  • Listening to others present their posters and asking questions was good experience for presenting our own. The kids were a little more nervous about this poster, thinking that the questions would be harder, but they soon got in the groove of explaining the different aspects of our work and answering questions.
  • My takeaway lesson is that the students are much more tolerant of "issues" that make the research projects difficult to carry out and are generally content to be involved and learning something new.
  • The most interesting thing I noticed this year was that I spent much more time seeking out, listening to and talking about science than I did about education itself. There was plenty of overlap but I felt more confident asking questions and I had a much better idea of the questions I wanted to explore.

Related Teams

AAS - 2011