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AAS - 2023

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 2022 and 2023 NITARP teams attended the 2023 January AAS meeting in Seattle, WA. The 2022 class was presenting results and the 2023 class was starting up. We had alumni raise money to come back as well. We sent about 30 people to the AAS and had a grand time. Please see the special article on NITARP at the AAS. All of the posters we presented are here:

2022 Teams:

Alumni:

  • Granucci, "Does a Solar Telescope generate more interest in astronomy than Night Observing Telescope?" (talk)
  • Kniezewski, "To Rain or Not to Rain: Correlating GOES Flare Class and Coronal Rain Statistics" (poster and press release; student alumna!)

Quotes

  • Programs like this are incredibly important to the growth of teachers. I know that I certainly grew both as a person and as an educator through this experience. It was really fun to be thrown into a group with other people and have to work on working together and learning something entirely new.
  • What has changed about my teaching is how I go about asking questions, and I have modeled this after the way Varoujan asks questions and WAITS. I don’t know if he knows this, but he is a master at what teachers call ‘wait time’, which is the process of waiting for students to answer a question and not jump in to answer it for them. He is so patient when asking all of us questions, and it gives us a chance to think and figure out the answer, even if we get it wrong the first time. Most teachers are not good at ‘wait time’ because they are uncomfortable with silence and want their students to know the answers. I have learned to ask better questions with my students and patiently wait for answers, and if my students have the wrong answer, it is OK, we work to figure it out together.
  • Teachers are more effective and inspirational when they engage in the learning process just like their students. NITARP is invaluable for teachers and is far superior than any professional development that a school district could or would offer.
  • I am now more aware that astronomy can be a wider variety of things. Astronomers and astrophysicists can be visiting distant observatories, but they can also resemble highly technical librarians sifting through collected data to construct models and simulate complex systems from shards of glimpses into the EM spectrum.
  • What I already knew about astronomers/astronomy that was confirmed was that you need to work really hard to do research and that often there are things you see in the data that you can’t necessarily explain right then and there. There is still a lot we don’t know and so much archival data still to go through.

AAS - 2023