Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, CA
Students have a weekly online reading assignment (hosted by SurveyMonkey.com), where they answer questions based on reading their textbook, material covered in previous lectures, opinion questions, and/or asking (anonymous) questions or making (anonymous) comments. Full credit is given for completing the online reading assignment before next week's lecture, regardless if whether their answers are correct/incorrect. Selected results/questions/comments are addressed by the instructor at the start of the following lecture.
The following questions were asked on reading textbook chapters and previewing presentations on Kirchhoff's laws.
Selected/edited responses are given below.
Describe something you found interesting from the assigned textbook reading or presentation preview, and explain why this was personally interesting for you.
"I think the emission spectrum is pretty cool. I like the fact that you can't see the full continuous spectrum, that through the emission of the gas, there are only certain things you can see on the spectrum."Describe something you found confusing from the assigned textbook reading or presentation preview, and explain why this was personally confusing for you.
"I liked to officially read in a textbook about the Doppler Effect. I had first learned about this from The Big Bang Theory, the TV show!"
"The different sound wavelengths of when the car moves 'towards' or 'away' can either be squished or stretched, just like light from moving stars."
"I find it very interesting that light can be split up into a rainbow."
"Hearing about how parallax is used to measure the distance of the sun from planets--especially hearing about how the best time to do this is when Venus is eclipsing the sun since I got to see the transit of Venus this summer."
"How astronomers are able to calculate the amount of each element present in a star and how those elements are identified."
"I thought 'spectrum' was interesting because I always heard that word and never really understood what it meant."
"I found the different spectra interesting because I never really took time to notice the differences before when I'd see something with a spectrum until now."
"Can we talk about different spectra more? They are hard to tell apart in certain visuals."Ask the instructor an anonymous question, or make a comment. Selected questions/comments may be discussed in class.
"Trying to imagine light as a photon and a wave can be a little mind-boggling."
"What I found confusing was the 'redshift' and 'blueshift'--how do you know when it's a red or blue shift?"
"The Doppler effect is confusing. I can't understand why sound waves seem to compress traveling out ahead of an object and then stretch out traveling away behind an object."
"Absolute magnitude and apparent magnitude. It seems like they should be simpler than how the book describes it. But I'm not sure."
"I'm still working on understanding how absorption spectra and emission spectra are formed, and how these lines form a 'fingerprint' for each element."
"I found confusing how the parallax is measured."
"How to distinguish the types of spectrum in the pictures was confusing. I was looking for rainbows."
"Absolute magnitude is the apparent visual magnitude that star would have if it were 10 pc away, what does 'pc' stand for?" (A parsec, which is 3.26 light years, or the distance light would travel in 3.26 years.)
"I found the triangulation of stars to be a little confusing. The only reason for this is that I hate math. I did all the math that I needed to so that I can transfer, and I don't really want to do a whole lot more. It wasn't terribly confusing, math just freaks me out." (Teaching math freaks me out, too. However, the focus in this course is on comparing which variables affect certain quantities, and not on actually calculating values for those quantities.)
"Do you like physics or astronomy more?" (To me, they are the same thing. However, I enjoy teaching astronomy to non-science majors more than teaching physics to engineers.)
"Star night?" (Cancelled as of 5:30 PM that night due to party cloudy conditions. Yes, I know that the clouds cleared, but I had to make the call based on what I saw.)
"Why don't you like The Big Bang Theory?" (The Big Bang Theory makes fun of nerds and geeks. Shows like Community has fun with nerds and geeks.)
"Starting to get the hang of this class finally." (Keep doing what you're doing (that is, going through the unused flashcard questions.)
"Can we do more flashcard questions in class?" (As time allows in class, but go through the unused flashcard questions for homework.)
"I love how we spot check each other in-class activities and flashcards, can we start spot checking each other on quizzes too? :)" (I don't think you'd want to do that, if I get to choose which students you work with on the quizzes.)
"How does light waves have anything to do with the Doppler effect?" (All types of waves emitted from moving objects (whether sound, or light) experience the Doppler effect.)
"Do you have a system or algorithm with these group rotations? Been grouped with some people multiple times already while a bunch of others not at all." (Each group is meant to be comparable mixture of students in overall course ranking. If you haven't been grouped with certain students (yet), you are probably very close to them in class standing so far in this course.)
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