Accretionary Wedge 44: My Most Important Teacher

Metageologist over at the All-geo blog network has put out calls for posts about most important teachers, which really wasn't something I had to think much about. I easily could identify that person.

My sophomore year of high school I decided to participate in Science Olympiad, I wasn't sure what I would do, but I knew I liked science so I went out. Well at the first meeting I committed a great heresy; when my friend asked me to team up with her to try out for the Rocks and Minerals competition, I told her no, that it would be too boring. However, she called in an old favor or something like that, and twisted my arm into trying out for the team.

I barely knew anything about rocks and next to nothing about minerals, so when I met up with the team mentor I had no idea what to expect, but I was quickly proved wrong in my initial assumptions. The mentor, Coach Ford, was a science teacher I had never met, but I had only been on campus for a few weeks so it wasn't suprising. He was fairly tall, a little lanky, grey and wrinkled, but with a kind and wiley smile. He spoke extremely softly, and if the room wasn't silent you could easily miss almost every word he said. We started in on minerals, which was interesting, especially the crystalline geometries, though I had some trouble grasping them at first.

I wouldn't say I was that interested in the subject until he opened up a textbook and went over the rock cycle.  I believe we might have gone over it once before, but after having a grasp on the basics of geology, I was blown away by the implications of the cycle. The idea that all material on the Earth had been recycled was amazing and I sat at home dumbstruck that night. Then he started talking about igneous rocks, and showed us the basic identification chart and I was sold hook, line, and sinker.

If that's all he had done it probably wouldn't have been enough to become my most important teacher; however, you have to understand the trouble he had to go through to reach me. First off, I was a high school athlete, so instead of meeting after class we had to meet after wrestling practice (either at 7:00 or 8:00 pm) and then he would go over geology (as well as other competitions such as astronomy, ecology, oceanography, etc.) for up to two or three hours, thus he came back to work at all hours of the night just to teach us subjects; not because it was his job, but just because he wanted to.

Then during my junior and senior years, I took his classes and he still liked me afterwards, which is in of itself somewhat impressive. I wasn't a good student, I got good grades, but I didn't pay attention, I had a tendency to nap in classes, and was given to flights of fancy. School had never been challenging and I was bored, but he didn't get frustrated; instead he inspired me. We learned about a numerous miraculous phenomena, he took us on field trips, and he made us teach each other. Other classes were fun and other classes were useful, but the two classes I took (Environmental Science and Astronomy, Meteorology, Geology) were the most useful and the most interesting.

The best part of his classes was that he pushed scientific literacy; he honestly believed that our lives would be improved by a greater understanding of the natural world. Those of his students who took advantage of his teachings were greatly improved by this philosophy, although most probably didn't do so as we lived in a very religiously conservative area, and I would say this made his work even more impressive as he reached out his hand to students who slapped it away.

Suffice it to say that I would not be in this amazing field if it was not for Coach Ford, to the extent that whenever I receive a great opportunity (like a NASA internship) I e-mail him and thank him for inspiring me so much.

NASA Tweetup: The Pretweetup-Wednesday

A few weeks ago when I found out that I was picked to attend the Mars Science Laboratory with NASATweetup, I was ecstatic as I would not have expected to have been chosen in a million years. However, I am a college student, and as a college student I do not have much money, so I would like to thank my parents and Aunt Marty for providing me with transportation and lodging for the event.

Originally, MSL was supposed to go up on Friday, so we were going to have the first round of speakers and a tour of KSC on Wednesday then nothing on Thursday and the final round of speakers and the launch on Friday. However, due to a battery malfunction the launch was postponed to Saturday. Changing my travel schedule to accommodate this was actually pretty difficult, and I realized just how isolated my little corner of the world is as it was very difficult to find flights coming back this way on the Sunday after the launch. However, registration and the tour was tentatively still on Wednesday so I had no qualms about going early, and I had never been to Florida and this would be only the second time I had been on the East Coast so I was excited to see something new.

One thing I do have to confess is that I'm not a very social person.  In large groups, I have a tendency to sit in the back and keep quiet and it usually takes me a while to feel comfortable around new people and I usually don't start talking until I feel comfortable. So when I arrived in St. Louis around noon and saw the tweet that all events had been postponed until Friday I was scared and thought that I would spend the first two days alone. Luckily, I couldn't be more wrong.

First off, NASATweeps are awesome people, besides the fact that they, as a prerequisite, are Space Nerds, they are incredibly kind and giving. From @conductor222 driving nearly an hour away from the Pre-Tweetup dinner to pick me up from the airport and driving around, to literally everybody stopping and saying hi if they saw you wearing your NASATweetUp badge; every space tweep demonstrated immense kindness and compassion, and on top of that each and every one of them was very interesting to talk to you, as they liked to talk about space which is one of the two coolest conversation topics(the other being geology).


So the Tuesday before the Tweetup passed without incident, I reached my hotel room watched NASA TV for a bit, and went to sleep. Wednesday started slowly @conductor222 picked me up and then we went and picked up @libbydoodle (who thankfully let me use her photographs as mine suck). We found KSC pretty easy; however instead of going to the press accreditation building we went to the employee badging office.

Wrong building

Correct building

They may look similar, but they were on different roads and a fair distance apart (if the press accreditation building was the bulls-eye on the dart board, we hit the wall). After we registered and met some of our fellow space nerds, we then decided to go take pictures of the Astronaut Hall of Fame (it wasn't open yet and it took us a bit to remember and decide to go to the Visitor Center.

 We took a lot of pictures, but the area basically boils down to these three sites, at least on the outside. We then decided that we should go check out the Visitor Center as it was open. I don't think any of us knew how much there was to do there, and how it would consume all our time (in a good way, like a whale with an amusement park in its stomach).

The Gate way to Nerdvana

They were ready for the holiday season

As were the Astronauts

We didn't have a solid plan when we entered the gates as there was so much to do.  We ended up seeing a 3-D Imax movie about the ISS (highly recommend it) then there was lunch. Afterwards we decided to pay our respects at the Astronaut memorial

Astronaut memorial

The memorial is amazing.  First off it is huge, and as you can (somewhat) see it has a mirrored surface with the names of the astronauts engraved into the surface and lit from behind. This creates an amazing effect which makes these heroes name seem to be floating among the clouds.

An engraving of those who have gave their lives in the pursuit of discovery

Here we then met up with @ridingrobots and @french_marc, two other NASATweetup participants, and were able to get a picture with one of them!

@ridingrobots was taking the picture

Afterwards we wandered over to the rocket park which is amazing, I have seen the ones at JSC and the Space History Museum in Alamagordo, but this puts both to shame by the shear size and quantity of the rockets.

I am still fascinated by the Saturn V

This is where we made a mistake, and wandered into the gift shop. You see, I usually have pretty good impulse control; however, I lose this when I become surrounded by amazing space memorabilia.

You look so inviting; little did I know you would take all my money!

I wanted one of everything (so I guess I did control my spending...a bit)

 @libbydoodle and I ended up spending way too much time in the gift shop and I ended up with a meteorite.

My Precious!

After an undisclosed amount of time, we left the gift shop (I really don't want to tell you how long) and wandered around a bit.  Eventually our wanderings brought us to these two amazing people

who we initially mistook as LEGO employees, which would have been really cool, but you know what assuming makes out of 'u' and 'me'. They were two engineers with decades worth of experience on the shuttle. We ended up talking to them for almost an hour which was one of the most inspirational and informative personal conversations I have ever had, and definitely the most of my conversations with strangers. They talked about the importance of hard work and STEM fields; they talked about their experiences from accidentally sitting on the shuttle toilet while moving components into the ship to the procedures they followed in their jobs. My favorite, though, was how they kept coming back to how you have to move forward, how you can't become complacent with where you are, instead you have to always be moving forward. While this was directed at the Shuttle and the 30 years we spent in the same place, their advice resonates with anybody at any stage of your life. You can become complacent and never strive to improve your lot in life, or you can push forward and achieve new and amazing things.

After about an hour, we had to cut our conversation in order to make it to Dr. John Grotzinger's talk about the geology of Gale Crater (MSL's landing site).  It was an interesting and informative talk and made me even more excited for Curiosity to start finding new evidence about early Mars. I also got the opportunity to ask him questions about graduate school and I received some advice about what I should do to get ready.

Some interesting slides from the talk

Dr. Grotzinger, if you are reading this, I would like to apologize for cornering you and asking about grad school

We then were able to explore the Explorer building which had some of my favorite exhibits

Like these awesome posters (does anyone know where you can buy copies?)

And an awesome mockup of Curiosity!

Then, as we are very much adults, Libby and I did the most grown-up thing possible; we played with LEGO blocks! NASA and LEGO were having an event where they were encouraging creativity among kids by having them build their own space themed LEGO designs. These ranged from the highly practical to the highly fanciful

Yep, these kids are having an amazing childhood

@conductor222 had already tried her hand at building, so we felt that we should try to do something as well, which were were pretty enthusiastic about so we hopped right to it. The best part was when the two engineers we talked to earlier stopped by and ended up helping Libby with her rocket and explaining what parts of the rocket would do in real life.

Libby's rocket

And I built a rover with a robotic arm. Its collecting a sample

By this time, we had filled up our day with as much space nerdery as the operating hours of the park would allow, so we headed back to the car for dinner with more space nerds and to rest up for tomorrow. But as we left, we were treated to a beautiful view of rocket park at sunset which was a great way to end the day.

Geology Analogies

I tutor science for my school, and recently was able to add geology to my list of classes I tutor, which is amazing because now I get to be paid for talking about geology. So today I had my first client, and while explaining some concepts, I came up with two analogies. I thought they were pretty fun and useful, and the student lit up after I had finished as they had just grasped the subject; however, I was wondering if I could improve these analogies, or if I had overlooked anything. Please keep in mind, though, that this is an intro class aimed at non science majors

1. Bowen's reaction series:

I forgot where I found this, but if you know please tell me and I will add proper credit.

This mostly deals with the continuous reaction series; I was attempting to explain why the heavier elements form minerals at higher temperatures. To do this, I linked minerals in a melt to children on a playground, and the heat is analogous to massive amounts of sugar fed to them. As they run around the playground, the bigger kids will collapse first and the lightest most energetic kids will be the last to collapse, with collapsing being analogous to coming out of solution.

2. Crystal Formation in Phaneritic and Aphaneritic rocks
In this analogy there are two sets of kids with a lot of Lego blocks in two separate rooms.  The Lego blocks are analogous to the molecules in the melt, and the shapes they are built into are the crystal shapes of the minerals. The group in the first room isn't given much time and each kids quickly puts together very small geometric shapes.  This is analogous to Aphaneritic rocks cooling on the surface. In the other room, the kids are given a lot of time to build their shapes, and instead combine the shapes each kid makes into much larger shapes.  This is analogous to Phaneritic rocks.

So do these analogies make sense to you? Can they be improved? And if so, how?

Accretionary Wedge 38: Things I Wished I Learned and Things I Want to Learn

I haven’t blogged much, mostly because I’m about as scattered brained as you could get (I was going to say I haven’t done much, but then I remembered touring the Lunar Sample Lab, the Trinity Site, and several interesting hikes which I should have written about, well I will get to that soon-ish) however, when I read about this topic, I figured I had a few things to say, so I would try to write some.

                First off, I wish somebody would have told me in High School that you could study Geology in college and what you could do with that education. I honestly didn’t even know that Geologists did actual science.  I thought they were more technicians in mines or the oil fields; I grew up in the Permian Basin with a working pump jack in my school’s courtyard and two oil refineries on the outside of town, so that was all the experience I had with it. I had been interested in Earth Science since I read a book on Plate Tectonics in the first grade, but nobody told me you could make a living off of it. This actually brings me to a related issue, that I wish a professor at New Mexico Tech would have told me the definition of petrology (or I would have just asked him to clarify) since my only understanding of  the prefix petro- came from petroleum I assumed the worst. And because my stated goal in going to college was first and foremost to get away from the oil fields, I thought that Geology wasn’t the field for me and went into college without a clear path towards a degree.

                Ironically, once I talked to one of the Geology professors I found out how much I could do with a geology degree, I promptly switched my major after an aimless two year period where I floated through the basics for every science and even wetted my feet in social studies (which ended fairly unpleasantly). While most of my classes applied to my Geology degree since you have to know a lot of everything to effectively understand geology, I still wasted a lot of time on classes that didn’t interest me just so I could realize that they didn’t interest me.

                Besides learning some technical skills, which are difficult to attain at a small university, I would like the opportunity to take a class with a holistic look at the geosciences. It would be nice once you learn about Mineralogy, Petrology, Geochemistry, Sedimentology, Structural Geology, etc. to put all that knowledge together and see how they interact with one another in real life. I know that it would be nearly impossible to cover all of geology so in depth in one class, but maybe just looking at one local phenomena and looking at how the different geoscience disciplines interact with each other in that instance. For example, in New Mexico we could study the Rio Grande Rift and see how the structures formed by it where influenced by different properties of the rocks and minerals affected. It was enjoyable in introductory Geology to look at the big picture; however, I think it would be useful to step back at the end of your undergraduate degree and look at the big picture again, in the light of all you have just learned.

New Project

I feel very fortunate for a variety of reasons, but especially because I was given a great chance to succeed in science where the majority of my peers in Southeast New Mexico had to jump over huge hurdles just to have a chance to understand the subject. My parents are both teachers and they worked diligently to instill in my siblings and myself the importance of education; we went to a zoo, museum, or historical site nearly every vacation.  While we were driving we would talk about the history of the area or my dad would quiz our mathematical abilities  Nearly everything we did would somehow become a learning experience.

And while I always had a love of learning, my family helped nurture it, turning what might have been a secondary hobby, into my lifelong passion. The best example of this is when I was in fourth or fifth grade my uncle decided that every birthday/Christmas he should give me a book that would be too hard for me to understand right then, but eventually I would be able to. For some reason that I can't remember, the first book he gave me was Darwin's On the Origin of Species which I tried to read right then and got through the introduction before it was too hard. However, this was a huge turning point in my life and I continued to learn as much as I could about science from then on.

Like I said above, this gave me a huge advantage of my peers at school.  While I was learning about science and getting a jump start, their pastors, parents, etc were holding them back. Telling them science was wrong, evil, and a ploy to still their freedom or their soul.  As a result I have noticed that most of my friends from high school and college are very misinformed about science. I want to try to change this, though, and I have  come up with a project to try to change this. My Facebook friends are filled with people who have very little formal science education and their informal knowledge comes from impartial sources with political motivations to discredit everything from evolution to climate change to even the idea of an ancient Earth, so I want to offer to answer any question they might have about any discipline of science. I have a good basic background in science and can look up most answers myself; however, to add some legitimacy to this endeavor, I was hoping for some professional scientists to contribute to some the answers, even if it is only a line or two of logic or giving some evidence.

I want to do this because I believe that a personal touch in science outreach will encourage people to trust the experts instead of viewing them as shadowy authority figures. Hopefully this could help a group of students who have little to no science education learn to appreciate and enjoy the study. And maybe, this could serve as a model for other students from similar areas to spread their knowledge to their friends and family. Who knows maybe other science students in the position I am in could help expand the public's scientific understanding.