The astronomy block in my senior year of high school remains one of the most memorable in my K-12 education. It wasn’t that the stars somehow interested me more than another subject but rather that our teacher was able to inspire me and my classmates in such a way that all of us regardless of our individual interests were able to experience a connection to astronomy.
Our mornings were spent in the classroom learning and thinking about the movements of the stars and our place in relation to them. At the end of the course we were able to tell where we were on earth and what time of year it was simply by looking up at the stars. Our afternoons were spent at a forge where we each fashioned a bracelet out of copper and learned how to fasten a stone onto it. Working the metal with our hands grounded the complex thinking which we engaged in during the morning.
I remember on our first day of class sitting in a circle while our teacher placed one after another different types of metal into our hands. At the end he asked us if we could feel the difference between gold and silver, iron and lead without knowing which was which, and much to our surprise, we could. Through the guidance of our teacher we gained an understanding of an aspect of the world which cannot be learned through a textbook or computer.
At another point he assigned each of us to a planet and instructed us in how to move around each other mimicking the movements of the solar system. Later he challenged us to picture what those movements would be like if we imagined that a planet such as Venus or Mars was at the center of the universe. To say the least, our imaginations and thinking capabilities were challenged to the utmost. I remember the tingling feeling travel up my spine as I realized that the center of the universe was where ever I imagined myself to be!
In the afternoons on the way to the forge we often stopped in town for lunch. Over hamburgers and curly sweet potato fries we chatted about cars, college, the town and numerous other things. Our teacher shifted from teaching to being one of us as we sat around the picnic table. By the end of the block we no longer thought of him as our teacher but rather a well respected friend.
As we carefully tapped away at the copper, we learned the precision and concentration necessary to form the metal into the correct form. Our teacher circulated among us encouraging us to keep tapping a little more even when it seemed like we had been at it for days. Eventually we achieved the desired result and were ready to mold the metal around our stone. When our teacher saw which stone I had chosen for my bracelet he said, “You like water, don’t you?”. How he knew that I was fascinated with the swirling patterns of water is beyond me.
Shivering together late one evening in the school parking lot, we mapped the stars and planets in the sky. Our teacher had made it clear to us how fascinating and mysterious the heavens are, and because of this we looked up in awe at the skies, witnessing in reality what we had learned in the classroom. Suddenly low in the sky near the planet Venus a meteor with a flaming tail shot across the horizon and was gone. Although the light of that meteor has long since died away, the realizations and experiences I had in this class because of the interactions with my peers and the guidance of our teacher will continue to shine in my memory and inspire me for years to come.
