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Re: Physicists teaching astronomy



When I wrote that naming stars is like bird-watching, I was thinking
of Feynman's essay in which he distinguishes between knowing only the name
of a bird, and knowing about the bird...its habits, behavior, diet, etc.,
and how the latter is preferable to the former. Feynman argues that you can
know a lot about a bird without knowing its proper name. Yes, counting
populations of birds, or stars, has been invaluable to science. Casual
bird-watching, and amateur astronomy, has benefitted science greatly.
However, for most people the simple ability to identify birds or to name
stars is just a nice satisfying little party trick. Is it worth spending a
lot of class time on?
In any case, the best way to learn star-naming (or bird-naming) is
to go outdoors and compare the real thing with a chart. Which brings up the
practical difficulty of teaching star-naming to 125 students in a daytime
class located 200 miles from the nearest planetarium in an area where it's
cloudy most of the time. Therefore, I decided not to teach students to
identify more than two or three constellations or to name more than three or
four stars. I'd rather use the class time to teach basic science, as applied
to how stars work. Which is my pedagogical judgement, which doesn't have to
agree with everyone else's pedagogical judgement, and it's a judgement which
might have been different if my course had a lab (it didn't), or if the
students were science majors.

Vickie


Subject: Re: Physicists teaching astronomy


" ... Astronomy isn't about finding and naming the stars
and planets in the sky. This is fun, but it's like teaching bird-watching
in biology...there's little science in it."


Not quite -- such data is necessary to relate ecological effects, e.g.
DDT. global warming, etc.

Here's an example from a "Twitchers'" site

*snip*


And if included with the naming is O B A Fine Girl Kiss Me (R N S)
Quick, absolute magnitude, etc. it leads into H-S diagrams, and as you
would say "real astronomy".

bc (son of a twitcher, step son of a Pro. Ornithologist)

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