The older you get, the more you realize that life ain’t easy and the world ain’t always a wonderful place. One of the things that makes life worth living nonetheless is when you discover some unsung little corner where good things are happening, mostly unnoticed by the world at large. Such places are hard to find, but I think that I just discovered an example, right in my hometown. It’s a mini-planetarium located inside of one of our middle schools. Recall that a planetarium is a domed shaped theater where you see what the night sky should look like but doesn’t due to pollution and haze and too many lights (unless you’re out in the Arizona desert). They show you the planets and the Milky Way and the Moon and the constellations, the Big Dipper, Andromeda, Orion, all that stuff, right from the comfort of a movie-theater seat. You usually find them in big city museums, not in local middle schools.
I’m long past middle-school age and I grew up in another town, so I didn’t discover the local planetarium as an 8th grader. I’m not a parent either, so I didn’t hear any kids talking about it. Nope, I’m just a middle-aged guy who still likes to learn, so I signed up for an astronomy course offered by the town’s evening adult school. That finally brought me to it, after living in this town for 15 years. Even after I signed up for the course, it still took a bit of trial and error to actually find this planetarium. The adult school bulletin gave the address for the middle school, but when I got there for the first class, all the doors seemed locked. Next day I called up the school and found out just where the planetarium is — it turned out to be in the back, at the far corner of the parking lot. OK, so I missed the first week’s session, but there were still three more to go.
On the following Wednesday night, I joined a small group of fellow adult learners on an in-progress guided tour of the heavens courtesy of Mr. Miller, the school’s planetarium instructor. Mr. Miller works mostly with the middle school students by day, but had agreed to open his theater of the stars to adult learners for an evening session. And I’m glad that he did.
It’s nice to know that our town’s youth have access to their own planetarium and to an inspired instructor like Mr. Miller. He’s one of those showman teachers who would not impress you much if you saw him standing in line at the supermarket checkout, but who revs himself up with enthusiasm and knowledge when placed in front of a group of students. The man clearly has a passion for the world of astronomy and science, and knows a lot of tricks to share his knowledge with his audience.
One technique is an obvious one, i.e. “here, see for yourself”. So, during the third session, we went outside with binoculars and a telescope, and looked at Orion and the Big Dipper. Using the scope, we were able to see the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn in all their glory. On another night, he had us hold a sheet of plastic and he rolled various objects, some like softballs, some more like marbles, to help us conceptualize the modern-physics views of space topography in keeping with Einsteinian relativity principles and the bending of light by gravity. (What he was demonstrating was that space is not exactly defined by straight lines, but gets twisted around a bit due to the effect of mass and gravity on light beams; he demonstrated the effect of a black hole by severely twisting and distorting a part of the plastic “reality” sheet). And at the final class, he had us make crude spectroscopes out of juice drink cartons, to show how astronomers analyze the light from the stars as to find out just what they are made of and how they are moving (red shift, etc.).
A lot of people didn’t enjoy most of their science classes in high school and college, because science can be a bit abstract. (Unfortunately, science has to be abstract, in order to progress). But maybe once or twice, if you were lucky, you ran across a teacher with so much enthusiasm for the subject that you just couldn’t help but get interested yourself, which increased your willingness to slog through the boring stuff (endless textbook chapters and tough math problems for homework) in order to share a few peaks of enlightenment with your teacher. Or if not, perhaps you watched those introductory science TV shows, like “Mister Science” or “Bill Nye the Science Guy”. Well, it’s nice to know that in some obscure corner of one of our local schools, there’s a guy something like that, in a little cave with a light projection machine getting kids interested in becoming astronauts or astrophysicists someday. And even occasionally making some adult school students regret that they didn’t go that route.
Oh, you might ask, how do I know that the kids actually like him? Well, some of the adults in the class had kids at that school, and two of them attended some of our classes. In other words, these kids actually gave up a bit of their precious after-school time to hang out some more in Mr. Miller’s planetarium. I could see that he had a good rapport with them. One final bit of evidence: Mr. Miller’s own web site, which is obviously set up for the benefit of his students. Let me share his “see for yourself” technique, and give you a LINK to it.