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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 rarely get out among other teachers in the same field as I am, with similar interest and motivations, and even less often do I have time to be in the company of professional scientists to see and hear what they are doing, how it is being done, what technologies are being used, etc. Without this type of program to get me to a meeting like the AAS I would never be able to put all of this together.
  • 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.
  • I didn't anticipate how nice everyone was going to be to us as high school students at the conference -- everybody who stopped by was very encouraging and seemed impressed by the fact that we were there, let alone making a decent presentation.
  • 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.
  • I enjoyed working alongside my students in a way that felt very different from the typical classroom setting.

Related Teams

AAS - 2013