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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

  • 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.
  • By far the most interesting thing to me was the experience of presenting the poster. Not only did it make me feel like I was really part of the conference, it made me look back to the previous AAS when presenting a poster was not just very scary, it was almost inconceivable. So what a journey! Reflecting on how overwhelmed and terrified I was last year, how hard I worked to learn everything, and then to be there actually doing it with some confidence, well...priceless.
  • I did not anticipate how much the astronomers would trust us right away. I felt more like a colleague than a student, which was relieving (and maybe a bit stressful, because I probably would have found it easier to ask questions coming from a student role).
  • [student:] I realized that astronomers are very nice people, and very helpful. They love to talk about their research, which is not something that I'm complaining about. Listening to them talk about everything they've done made me almost as excited as they were!
  • This [is] the absolute best learning experience in my career as a teacher!

Related Teams

AAS - 2013