In order to renew my teaching certification while not employed by a school, I chose to take the certification exam. The trouble turned out to be that a quarter of the exam was on Earth and Space Science and, having the hubris to believe I could pass this thing without any elaborate preparation, I found out about the Earth and Space Science tidbit the day before the exam. Cool. 24 hours to learn.
I did what you do and took a practice test to narrow down the areas where my lack of knowledge intersected with the test’s emphases and thus made myself a road map of topics. It turns out that Hurst and Graben are not a law firm and are best explained by diagram. The types of faults were on the test and also weren’t that easy to find in the sources I usually rely upon to elucidate my dark corners of science understanding. I found an article on Medium that was super helpful and the usgs had some info, but I usually prefer audio-visual information.
My favorite discoveries during my study session were related to Cosmology. This is the area I’m going to pursue, so keep your eyes open for all my various posts and lesson plans around the Big Bang Theory, black holes, and stars. I’m sold. This stuff is fascinating. For one thing, I found women in the field without even trying hard or typing “women studying cosmology” into google. There are not a lot of women in theoretical Physics, but the new telescope in Chile is named after Dr. Vera Rubin, I discovered while listening to a podcast that actually featured a woman who specializes in supernovae, Dr. Janna Levin (holy cow, is she a poet!?!). What’s more, this famous paper (called B2FH) on the origin of chemical elements is 1/4 written by a woman, Dr. Margaret Burbidge. Star science is full of women!
Other discoveries I made while brushing up on my Earth and Space Science is that there is a lot of good science information hidden in CrashCourse Geology. This lady is named after prevailing winds! It goes by fast, so I did a lot of pausing. Actually, the whole wind thing took a lot of my time to understand and I needed to do some external googling, but I turned out to need it. Also, the documentary series on Netflix called Our Universe is awesome and also a little bit strange in how it sort of layers concepts. The episode that includes black holes is also about the gestation of a baby chimpanzee. It’s about “time” in an Ira Glass sort of way. Deep.
So, anyway, learning is fun and I’ve walked you through how I do it a little bit. xoxo.