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 history of atoms, Earth, and the impacted worlds: the moon, and Mercury.
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.
"The moon and Mercury look alike in color and are covered with impacted craters. but different because Mercury has a larger core than the moon."Describe something you found confusing from the assigned textbook reading or presentation preview, and explain why this was personally confusing for you.
"I found the formation of Earth interesting and the process of the evolution of the atmosphere."
"The greenhouse effect. I didn't really understand it until now but the car example made it very clear."
"I found the comic strip interesting because Neil deGrasse Tyson is awesome. It was really cool the way he put things in perspective."
"We are a part of the universe. This is interesting, because: science."
"Learning about the origins of our atoms is amazing. Just thinking that stars made the iron in our bodies is amazing!"
"I had heard about the 'large-impact hypothesis' theory about the creation of the moon, but I didn't know that it produced lower density rock on the moon and also affected the rotation of Earth."
"That Mercury is only 40 percent larger than Earth's moon, and that it can't keep a permanent atmosphere. It sounds cool."
"I found plate tectonics confusing and the separation of plates on Earth."Ask the instructor an anonymous question, or make a comment. Selected questions/comments may be discussed in class.
"I kind of couldn't tell which feature on the moon was the youngest. Any advice on how I could tell which features are the youngest/oldest?"
"Mercury and the moon because i didn't know they were alike at all."
"Nothing was too confusing, it's weird because when you, P-dog, explain it in class is when I start to question things."
"The text seems to say that Venus would not have had its severe greenhouse affect if it had been able to retain water in an ocean and trap excess carbon there, but Venus was too close to the sun and couldn't keep its water. Is it really that simple? I thought that Venus was also in a habitable zone like Earth."
"What I found confusing in the assigned textbook reading is that they consider the moon as planet-like just because it's two-thirds the size of Mercury, and it is similar to Earth, Mercury, Venus, and Mars. Since they had said the moon was a natural satellite."
"I never really know what to write here, so hi. I like how you teach, you're funny!" (Okay. Funny: ha ha, or funny: weird?)
"I was listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson and he was talking about antimatter. He said that if aliens came to us (assuming that they hadn't touch the ground yet) he wouldn't shake their hand. He would throw something to them to make sure that we are the same matter." (Neil is da man. Incoming!)
"How much water could comets have actually carried to Earth? It seems like it could only be a small amount." (The specific amount of water from cometary impacts, compared to the amount of water outgassed from Earth's volcanoes is still being investigated. In any case, most of Earth's atmosphere is thought to have been outgassed from its volcanoes.)
No comments:
Post a Comment