I am a teacher.
Currently, I'm a chess coach. I readily admit to my "supervisor" that I am a horrible player, but I am a great teacher. I teach 6 separate chess classes to elementary aged children. In addition, I have created a drop in chess program at a library that sits on the edge of what used to be referred to as "The Projects." It is more mixed income than just some huge federal housing project. Middle income families own homes in it, and the entire development is well laid out, and has the feel of the German neighborhood I lived in when I was a "Manny" in Köln. It is not simply a dumping ground for the poor.
I created this volunteer position for myself. I simply proposed the idea to the library, and they thought it was great. That was 2 or 3 years ago.
I began my teaching "career" with 5 and 6 year old kids in a south end suburb in the Seattle Metropolitan area. After that, I took time off to stay home with my 1 year old son. He's 17 now, and I haven't returned to the classroom, except for a short stop as a reading intervention specialist that ended when I found out that my son, a socially ignorant 5th grader was "kicked out" of "friendship club." Personally, if I were that counselor, I would have been disappointed in myself.
I feel like I can get kids to learn just about anything.
So, rather than returning to the classroom, I recommitted to being the stay at home parent for an as yet unknown number of years.
Prior to teaching chess, I taught science in a live, informal setting for ten years.
This is about one of my favorite subjects to teach when I was in control of the console in the planetarium.
I could, quite literally, teach about anything that was happening in astronomy. I was not held down by any particular canned programming. We started with an outline for a program, and we took any questions that anyone had.
That meant that I would need to be able to explain the apparent movement of the planets across the sky to children and adults who had the prerequisite background knowledge, but also to those people who had no knowledge, or even to those who were completely opposed to the idea that what I was teaching was, in fact, fact.
The first planetarium console I worked on was nearly completely manual. In order to travel forwards or backwards in time, the gears would need to mesh. In order to get the gears to mesh, I would have to manipulate an array of dials and toggles.
The Spitz 512 Starball.
She was already 25 years old when we started dating. I would often begin a show with the Starball snuggled into its 15 foot deep concrete silo. The seating in this space was in the round. Forty or so people would be in comfortable bench seating in a 27 foot circle around the ball.
I would push and hold the toggle switch to raise the starball on its elevator. The ceremony of raising the ball was, in spite of the ancient technology, a little bit awe inspiring.
I was the DJ for the stars. I could make them do what I wanted them to do. I could make them dance and spin. I could send the planets hurtling across the sky, showing the forty or so people in the audience how it is that planets appear to move forwards and backwards across the scattered patterns of the background stars.
The starball was augmented by an array of ancient slide projectors, filmstrip projectors, and other various light play instruments. In order for these things to keep functioning, I would be forced to become a somewhat competent starball mechanic. I can't even count the number of times I nearly broke the machine.
The sky in steampunk. It was so retro, it made hipsters feel square.
Calendars
I was given the opportunity to write shows for the public. I would train the staff, and give them all the required parts of the program, but we always relied on each other to share tricks and ideas that we'd discovered along the way.
One of the most interesting opportunities to do this was when the facility hosted the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The authorities who oversee the scrolls are very serious. Everything has to go through them. Yet, for some reason, our planetarium was not considered part of that process. Or, we just didn't tell them.
How in the world does one write a planetarium show about religious writings?
I settled on the idea of demonstrating the difference between lunar and solar calendars.
A solar calendar is defined by time it takes the Earth to move around the sun. A lunar calendar is generally based on the time it takes for the moon to move through the phases.
A lunar year comprised of 12 "moonths" is 354 days. A solar year is 365.24 days, regardless of how we divide the time. The main point of the show is that the Dead Sea Scrolls contained indications that the writers used some sort of solar calendar as opposed to the lunar Hebrew Calendar.
I explained to the audience that there were two cousins who were born on the same date near Qumran, the location of the Dead Sea Scrolls. One of the cousins was born into a community that used the lunar calendar, and the other was born into a community that used the solar calendar. For some reason, the cousins claimed to be different ages. The mystery prompted our exploration.
I would cause time to pass in order for the audience to be able to witness the time difference inherent in each of the calendar types.
After discovering how much fun this particular activity was with an audience, I decided to include the same content in many more shows. Any time there was an astronomically dependent holiday, I would take the opportunity to manipulate the sky so that my audience could discover the difference between lunar and solar calendars.
My theme for New Years shows became something like, "Who is Not Celebrating the New Year?"
More Questions Than Answers
The goal of these shows was never to simply fill the audience with some information and send them away. In fact, the goal was more to prompt questions than to give answers to the questions my audience didn't ask.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed dropping certain bite sized factoids in the hope that whether here and now, or later and elsewhere, someone would have their own personal Eureka moment, and whisper the satisfying "Aaaaah" of discovery.
We would almost always talk about the various ways that calendars can be measured. We can measure time by any regularly apparent motion in the sky.
We could measure time partially by the greatest distance that Venus appears to move from the Sun in the sky, for instance.
We can measure time partially by the apparent rising of a particular star along the horizon, as some ancient Egyptians did when they created and used the first roughly 365 day calendar. If I remember correctly, the rising of Sirius would occur around the annual flooding of the Nile. The calendar they developed was actually 360 days, but it probably had, as I liked to tell my audiences, 5 party days thrown in, just to make everyone happy, I guess.
We can measure time partially by the passing phases of the moon. The main problem is that we would need to add "leap" segments to a lunar calendar to keep it in line with the seasonal changes caused by the tilt of the axis, and the Earth's motion around the sun.
I enjoyed pointing out that the Islamic calendar does not do this. There is a specific religious prohibition against adjusting the calendar to match the seasonal changes.
What was my goal when I taught this material?
I suppose one of my goals was just to use this cool machine to do this cool thing. Another of my goals was to inform. Still another goal would have been to cause the audience to ask questions during the show, or even after the show as they went home. I delighted in thinking that I may have caused people to reconsider their view of the world. I liked to think that they were pondering these things at home. I fully enjoyed the idea that some former audience member ten years in the future would read or see something about this subject, and they would remember this thing they experienced in the planetarium.
I am a proud teacher when I have caused someone to make their own discoveries.
I have a degree in English. The most recent science class I took in college was Geography.
It is safe to say that one of the things that prompted me to be well informed was the angsty terror provoked by the idea that I could be asked anything at any time. I would imagine the questions that could be asked at any moment. Eventually, being asked anything at any moment became the best thing, and was the reason I continued to look forward to those forty minutes in the dark with a bunch of strangers.
"Well, let's see if we can figure that out."
In reflection, I suppose one of the key things that I appreciated about this particular area of teaching was that we, as humans, are not bound to to any abstract notion of how things should or shouldn't be done.
We have the power, the insight, and the ability to make things the way we want them to be.
It gave me an inherent sense of the competence of humanity to encounter problems, and to think originally in solving them.