One of the very first tasks of this course is \u201cintroductions.\u201d All the students in the class write a quick description of who they are, and I\u2019m always impressed with people who can play water polo or bowl competitively; people who have complicated family lives that are really relatable or totally different from my own; people who aspire to be teachers but have an apprehension about science. People reveal all this stuff simply because I ask them, and I\u2019ve found that as the semester goes by I get to learn more things about you, which only makes me realize that there\u2019s still more that I don\u2019t know. You\u2019re all really interesting and complicated.<\/p>\n
So, I figured that it\u2019s only fair that I am at least as transparent about who I am. I\u2019m a lot less complicated than you might think. And you probably don\u2019t need to know anything about me in the first place, but I\u2019ll offer it.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re realizing right here on this line that you\u2019d rather not take any additional time to learn any more about me, you can stop. I love teaching and the natural world and my family. Everything else derives from this. The end.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the rest:<\/p>\n
Sometimes I have to give a presentation and someone will ask for a \u201cbio,\u201d or, I have to fill out a report an include what\u2019s known as a curriculum vita<\/em> or \u201cCV.\u201d I stow these kinds of things in the trunk of my university webpage<\/a>, and I distill a few things onto a personal page<\/a>, but a lot of that paints the same, plain picture. It\u2019s just me in my khaki pants, maybe with my shirt sleeves rolled up.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a list of things that I like, in no particular order:<\/p>\n A summary of all this is that I really, really love to play with the natural world and try to figure out how we learn this stuff. I think that learning science is a form of really engaged play, and I think that learning science and doing science both take on that kind of playfulness. This isn\u2019t to say that it\u2019s easy. It\u2019s hard. Really hard. So, when people come to a class like this and say that they\u2019re intimidated by science or that they\u2019re scared of this class, I can think of a million reasons why this could be the case. I\u2019d like to remove a lot of those reasons, but I\u2019m happy to honor the fact that it\u2019s challenging\u2014just like baking a good loaf of sourdough or playing a violin concerto or teaching fourth grade. That\u2019s what the course is all about. We\u2019ll untangle explanations about the natural world and look for the simple rules, and in the process we\u2019ll figure out how this is done by everyone from particle physicists to 5-year-olds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the very first tasks of this course is \u201cintroductions.\u201d All the students in the class write a quick description of who they are, and I\u2019m always impressed with people who can play water polo or bowl competitively; people who have complicated family lives that are really relatable or totally different from my own; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stc_notifier_status":"","_stc_notifier_sent_time":"","_stc_notifier_request":false,"_stc_notifier_prevent":false,"_stc_subscriber_keywords":"","_stc_subscriber_search_areas":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-123","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-notes"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DkEt-1Z","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstdrafts.net\/physicalscience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstdrafts.net\/physicalscience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstdrafts.net\/physicalscience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstdrafts.net\/physicalscience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstdrafts.net\/physicalscience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/firstdrafts.net\/physicalscience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":425,"href":"https:\/\/firstdrafts.net\/physicalscience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123\/revisions\/425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstdrafts.net\/physicalscience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstdrafts.net\/physicalscience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstdrafts.net\/physicalscience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n