Campus News - Classroom
Star Students
As Logan Woods x’09 gazes through a series of lenses at a distant point of light, he utters a line that would mortify most astronomy professors: “I think the key is to interpret the world as flat.”
But Robert Mathieu isn’t like most astronomy professors, and in his class, Woods’s observation is satisfactory. It means he’s working to internalize the lesson of the course: that real scientists don’t take any answers as absolute.
Mathieu teaches Astronomy 113: Hands on the Universe, where students learn about planets and stars, but the answers they come up with are less important than the questions they learn to ask. “The basic course goal is to show students the heart of the scientific way of knowing,” says Mathieu. “And that means teaching them uncertainty, about knowing well how wrong they might be.”
Hands on the Universe is one of the UW’s introductory astronomy courses, and the only prerequisite is Astronomy 103, a lecture class on stars, galaxies, and the universe, which can be taken concurrently. Students aren’t expected to be expert physicists before signing up, and freshmen are welcome. But however little science students have experienced before taking the class, Mathieu expects them all to leave thinking like scientists.
Students aren’t told the distance to various planets or stars, but rather are shown how to measure those distances — and re-measure them, and re-measure them again. They learn that scientific knowledge is built on repetition, combined with the calculation of margins of error and standard deviations.
But Robert Mathieu isn’t like most astronomy professors, and in his class, Woods’s observation is satisfactory. It means he’s working to internalize the lesson of the course: that real scientists don’t take any answers as absolute.
Mathieu teaches Astronomy 113: Hands on the Universe, where students learn about planets and stars, but the answers they come up with are less important than the questions they learn to ask. “The basic course goal is to show students the heart of the scientific way of knowing,” says Mathieu. “And that means teaching them uncertainty, about knowing well how wrong they might be.”
Hands on the Universe is one of the UW’s introductory astronomy courses, and the only prerequisite is Astronomy 103, a lecture class on stars, galaxies, and the universe, which can be taken concurrently. Students aren’t expected to be expert physicists before signing up, and freshmen are welcome. But however little science students have experienced before taking the class, Mathieu expects them all to leave thinking like scientists.
Students aren’t told the distance to various planets or stars, but rather are shown how to measure those distances — and re-measure them, and re-measure them again. They learn that scientific knowledge is built on repetition, combined with the calculation of margins of error and standard deviations.
“I want my students to learn that, in science, we don’t know the true answers,” Mathieu says. “We measure and compare the results that we come up with to those that others came up with, in hope that consensus brings us closer to truth. Even so, what we think are the right answers today will certainly change in the future, as we find ways to measure more accurately.”
Mathieu designed this course more than a decade ago as part of an overhaul of his department’s 100-level classes to incorporate more lab work. “When I first began teaching introductory astronomy, I used a traditional, didactic lecture,” he says. “But switching to an inquiry-based lab format including extensive collaborative learning broke the mold for me. It started to show me how learning really happens.”
As students calculate the mass of Jupiter or the distance of a particular star from Earth, they learn to rely on their own thinking, rather than merely memorizing information by rote from a textbook. Working in small teams, the students are expected to help each other learn, then to defend their answers to both Mathieu and the rest of the class.
“Watching the students teach each other is such a blast,” says Mathieu. “I usually just walk around and reflect their questions back to them. It’s such an easy course to teach, because the students really do all the teaching themselves.”
Of course, they don’t always teach each other by standard methods. On a night in October, the lab met for a lesson in optics and an exercise in building telescopes. But before the students can examine the series of lenses, Mathieu has them take out their notebooks to go over the previous week’s work — measurement of the mass of Jupiter. The discussion isn’t so much about the numbers the students came up with as it is about their understanding of what those numbers mean.
Mathieu designed this course more than a decade ago as part of an overhaul of his department’s 100-level classes to incorporate more lab work. “When I first began teaching introductory astronomy, I used a traditional, didactic lecture,” he says. “But switching to an inquiry-based lab format including extensive collaborative learning broke the mold for me. It started to show me how learning really happens.”
As students calculate the mass of Jupiter or the distance of a particular star from Earth, they learn to rely on their own thinking, rather than merely memorizing information by rote from a textbook. Working in small teams, the students are expected to help each other learn, then to defend their answers to both Mathieu and the rest of the class.
“Watching the students teach each other is such a blast,” says Mathieu. “I usually just walk around and reflect their questions back to them. It’s such an easy course to teach, because the students really do all the teaching themselves.”
Of course, they don’t always teach each other by standard methods. On a night in October, the lab met for a lesson in optics and an exercise in building telescopes. But before the students can examine the series of lenses, Mathieu has them take out their notebooks to go over the previous week’s work — measurement of the mass of Jupiter. The discussion isn’t so much about the numbers the students came up with as it is about their understanding of what those numbers mean.
On an overhead projector, Mathieu shows examples from several student papers and asks the class members if they can find flaws. When one answer is justified as being “not far from the actual mass of Jupiter,” Adam Peters x’09 points out that this way of thinking isn’t scientific. “We don’t know the actual mass but only the measured mass,” he says. “It’s
a scientific statement.”
The response earns praise from Mathieu. “The number may be close to the number in a textbook or to some professor’s measurement, but you should never think it’s the actual anything,” he says. “There’s only one thing I can tell you with absolute certainty in this class, and that’s that these numbers aren’t the actual mass of Jupiter. A scientific answer isn’t the value you come up with. It’s a range within which you claim the truth lies.”
When the review is finished, Mathieu has the students form groups to experiment with lenses. The goal is to study the optical principles on which telescopes are based, and the ostensible task is to align the lenses to bring into focus a pair of bright lights set up across the room. At the same time, through trial and error, the students challenge each other’s assumptions about how telescopes work.
This is how Woods came to try interpreting the world as flat. When looking through the lenses to find their focal point, he found that thinking of the problem a little differently gave him a more satisfactory result.
He then tries to communicate that to his classmates, and this leads the group to lengthy arguments about what they’re seeing and how to precisely measure it. The arguments grow until another student, Holly Brillowski x’09, jokes that they might as well chalk up their answers to witchcraft. Then
they finally settle into serious measurement.
“[That’s] collaborative learning,” says Mathieu. “It could be magic.”
— John Allen
a scientific statement.”
The response earns praise from Mathieu. “The number may be close to the number in a textbook or to some professor’s measurement, but you should never think it’s the actual anything,” he says. “There’s only one thing I can tell you with absolute certainty in this class, and that’s that these numbers aren’t the actual mass of Jupiter. A scientific answer isn’t the value you come up with. It’s a range within which you claim the truth lies.”
When the review is finished, Mathieu has the students form groups to experiment with lenses. The goal is to study the optical principles on which telescopes are based, and the ostensible task is to align the lenses to bring into focus a pair of bright lights set up across the room. At the same time, through trial and error, the students challenge each other’s assumptions about how telescopes work.
This is how Woods came to try interpreting the world as flat. When looking through the lenses to find their focal point, he found that thinking of the problem a little differently gave him a more satisfactory result.
He then tries to communicate that to his classmates, and this leads the group to lengthy arguments about what they’re seeing and how to precisely measure it. The arguments grow until another student, Holly Brillowski x’09, jokes that they might as well chalk up their answers to witchcraft. Then
they finally settle into serious measurement.
“[That’s] collaborative learning,” says Mathieu. “It could be magic.”
— John Allen
Class Note
Worldly Words
English 332: The Global Spread of English
English is a global language, but some varieties used around the world are unrecognizable to native speakers from the West.
“What many Americans and British consider ‘their’ language has been moving steadily around the world, being taken up and shaped and used in ways quite different from the English with which they are familiar,” says Jane Zuengler, a UW-Madison professor of English.
Zuengler gives her students a firsthand view of that phenomenon through a pilot course she is developing with Hassan Belhiah MA’98, PhD’05, a professor at Al Akhawayn University in Morocco. Videoconferencing melds two classrooms — more than four thousand miles apart — into one, with help from UW Learning Support Services and funding from a UW Faculty Development Grant.
Students also share stories by photo blogging, creating online profiles, and posting videos to a community Web site, all of which can become course material. Zuengler’s class explores dynamic issues surrounding who “owns” English, what happens to local languages as more people learn it, and what is
considered standard or correct usage.
In many countries, hip-hop artists mix English with local languages to create their songs, and students view some examples of the cultural mash up on YouTube. Students also study more formal efforts, such as in Singapore, where the government’s “Speak Good English” campaign strongly encourages citizens to reduce their use of Singlish — a local variety of English that includes words from Chinese, Malay, and Indian dialects.
“The questions we address in the course are ones with a global scope that many students tell me they have never considered before,” Zuengler says.
— Jenny Price ’96
English 332: The Global Spread of English
English is a global language, but some varieties used around the world are unrecognizable to native speakers from the West.
“What many Americans and British consider ‘their’ language has been moving steadily around the world, being taken up and shaped and used in ways quite different from the English with which they are familiar,” says Jane Zuengler, a UW-Madison professor of English.
Zuengler gives her students a firsthand view of that phenomenon through a pilot course she is developing with Hassan Belhiah MA’98, PhD’05, a professor at Al Akhawayn University in Morocco. Videoconferencing melds two classrooms — more than four thousand miles apart — into one, with help from UW Learning Support Services and funding from a UW Faculty Development Grant.
Students also share stories by photo blogging, creating online profiles, and posting videos to a community Web site, all of which can become course material. Zuengler’s class explores dynamic issues surrounding who “owns” English, what happens to local languages as more people learn it, and what is
considered standard or correct usage.
In many countries, hip-hop artists mix English with local languages to create their songs, and students view some examples of the cultural mash up on YouTube. Students also study more formal efforts, such as in Singapore, where the government’s “Speak Good English” campaign strongly encourages citizens to reduce their use of Singlish — a local variety of English that includes words from Chinese, Malay, and Indian dialects.
“The questions we address in the course are ones with a global scope that many students tell me they have never considered before,” Zuengler says.
— Jenny Price ’96
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