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AAS - 2013

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.

We were out in force at the AAS 2013 meeting in Long Beach, CA! A record number of NITARP-affiliated people attended, including the 2012 class finishing up and the 2013 class getting going. The 80 or so NITARP-affiliated folks made up about 3% of the AAS attendees.

Special article on AAS attendees!  And don't miss Danielle Miller's blog!

Quotes

  • I came away with many new ideas, new contacts to offer me support in my teaching and research, and a renewed enthusiasm for improving my teaching and my own understanding of astronomy.
  • All of the people that I interacted with were eager to share their knowledge. Even the people who visited our poster taught us by asking questions. I felt like I'd been submerged into this ocean of knowledge, which is a pretty cool feeling, and I tried my best to soak it up, even when some of the stuff people were talking about went over my head. The eagerness to teach was something I expected from NITARP but not necessarily from the wider astronomical community. So many people were willing to explain their projects and observatories to us high schoolers and listen to our questions.
  • The biggest change [in my classroom] I hope to make is to have my students do more science and more thinking then we normally do. So many of us science teachers do labs where the end is known (which is sometimes necessary to make sure they fit in a class period and that the students understand the concept we're trying to learn) but that's not really science.
  • You really do become co-learners with the students.
  • I definitely didn't anticipate that I would be this overwhelmed, though it's not in a negative way; I guess I didn't expect the depth that people had explored within specific subfields.

Related Teams

AAS - 2013