All of us that teach introductory astronomy want to relive that vicarious thrill of having our eyes opened to the fascinating and wonderful corners of the Universe science has uncovered. From the concordance model of the Big Bang and its observational evidence, to the exquisite precision of pulsars; from to the alien worlds orbiting the outer planets to the alien worlds orbiting other stars, from the triumphs and frustrations of Tycho through Newton, to the Nobel Prizes of cutting edge astronomy; we wouldn’t teach all of this if we didn’t love to talk about this stuff (well, most of us wouldn’t).
So why do we seem to spend office hours doing nothing but ratio problems?
Algebra is a prerequisite for astronomy 101 (and for college, really), so we would hope that all of our students don’t need that help, but the truth is that most of the one-on-one mentoring most of us do with the typical astronomy 101 student is helping them with the quantitative problems.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a book, a sort of “Cliff’s Notes” of the algebra of astronomy, that we could point them to? A sort of “office hours in print form” that they could study even after they left your office and immediately forgot how to solve for the period in Kepler’s Third Law?
(Particularly astute readers here will guess where I am going with this…)
The book’s website is here. Check it out right away!
But the BEST PART about this book isn’t all of that: it’s the great Web supplements, starring the authors themselves:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJauV3xQsQo
And if you act now, you and your students can get 20% off at this link:
Tell your friends! Tell your student bookstore! Tell your fellow astronomy 101 instructors looking for a recommended text on the syllabus!
Your office hours students will thank you for it.