I believe…

I post this with the uncomfortable understanding that in my classes within the context of critical thinking, belief requires no evidence. Everything I say here is, to my knowledge, based on what I hope is good evidence. I will go where the evidence leads me. I intend to update this post frequently. Most of it […]

Matter & Interactions I, Week 9

Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week constituted our fall break so this class only met once this week. I had extended all of the past WebAssign problems set deadline to Thursday of this week (the one day we met) and yet some students still haven’t not done them. Guilt. Whatever. Since we only had […]

Matter & Interactions I, Week 8

This post was written one week late. This week was devoted to chatper 3 of Matter & Interactions. The fundamental physics still centers almost exclusively on the momentum principle. Student are seeing more ways to apply it. I’m asking quite a lot of my students. I expect them to read an entire chapter, doing the […]

Did teaching happen today? Did learning happen today?

This is just a quick post to describe something I began doing last week. One of the, if not the, most frequent negative things said about my courses is that I “don’t teach” anything. In these days of corporate mindset, where students can basically levy any negative criticism they want at faculty and get an […]

The Learning Critical Thinking Through Astronomy Activities

I am somewhat limited in what I say in this post because I don’t want to give anything important away to students who find my blog (not that I care if they do). It occurred to me today that a post describing my astronomy course materials might be helpful for anyone considering using them or […]

Ideas for Next Fall

This week wraps up another academic year and I’m already mulling over some ideas for doing things differently in calculus-based physics next fall. This post is just a brain dump of those ideas. As always, feedback is welcome. Okay. My students have totally bought into standards based grading. I struggle with my standards and whether […]

A Diversity Experiment

Today I decided to try something new in my introductory astronomy class. I wanted to get a quick insight into what students think about diversity while in the safe haven of the classroom. Our classroom activities have “checkpoints” interspersed throughout so students can, quite literally, have a meeting of the minds in the center of […]

Building Up to Simultaneity (Activity)

Here’s a classroom activity intended to demonstrate the issue of simultaneity in measuring a stick’s length. Students need a calibrated metre stick (I’m trying to get into the habit of spelling it that way), another stick approximately 1/3 m long although the precise length is unimportant, two coins of the same denomination or two small pea-size balls […]

Modeling Reading for Depth and Understanding

Critical thinking is something we all say we want to impart to our students but something for which we frequently see very little explicit classroom modeling. This is one of the reasons the LCTTA (Learning Critical Thinking Through Astronomy) Project was started. This post will provide a very explicit way to introduce one aspect of […]