Astronomy Class - metaphysical hydrogen atoms --> stars!

Instructional Design, Mod 6 Post

​​At the University of Massachusetts/Amherst the Intro to Astronomy course I took in my freshman year (all the way back in 1983) was mad-fascinating, but I had to drop it because there were 300 people and it was too overwhelming. If the information had been chunked, I might have been able to handle it, but it was 300 people and a textbook and a theater full of 300 people three times a week. No way!

But this is the beauty thing: I took a good "chunk" of the course before I withdrew and learned the most fascinatingly important thing about astronomy: Stars behave exactly like hydrogen molecules because that's exactly what they are made of! As above, so below!

And this message was so cosmic and so exhilarating for me that I have (obviously) taken it with me for life, even though I did quit the course!

If the teacher had started with this fascinating, literally universal construct and then chunked the connecting information, I would have definitely stayed and gone through a lot more to "get it."

For instance, if this professor had chunked reviewing the hydrogen atom for the first week - reviewing atoms in general, really - we would have remembered/learned that a hydrogen atom is made up of 1 proton and 1 electron, and possibly a neutron in the nucleus with the proton. That balanced positive and negative charge makes a neutral atom with no charge.

There's a lot of other really cool info the professor could have included, like the quantum nature of the atom, how it constantly oscillates between matter and energy,

Then, if he had built up to a later chunk within this theme of universality, he would have explained how stars are completely made up of hydrogen atoms which bond together so completely they can build stars - more powerful than ANY atom bomb - that the biggest and smallest objects we are aware of are made up of the same exact structure, a hydrogen atom, which creates stars by squishing gazillions of them together - Man! That would've been a story!

Instead, I hung in there just long enough to figure this stuff out and then withdrew and had a much more manageable semester.

RuthyV