! wanted: attractive course title !
Learn about today's science, with a poem to state and comment on our subject. Each monthly issue of Scientific American, starting with January of 2020, contains a page called "Meter", featuring a poem on a scientific subject, usually presented with striking artwork. Each week, I will send you one or two of these pages to read and think about. Then we will discuss it via Zoom. As needed, I tell you more about the scientific field treated in the poem, and some recent advances. We will ramble about in cosmology, ecology, physics, biology, geology, genetics, chemistry, and mathematics. No scientific background required, and no question too basic. All readings provided at One Culture.
Repeat: Background in science is not a requirement for this course; on the contrary, it is a goal of this course. No question is too basic to be worthy of class attention.
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GR-NB: For work in progress on poems, interpretations, and connections, see iCloud Drive/MeterSciAmer or Poetry/MeterSciAmer.
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Website for a tentative OLLI course, "Meter and Science", in which I will use poems (and maybe art, music, ... or other works from the humanities) as starting points for teaching science to a general audience.
Assumptions:
• Distance learning by Zoom
• Use of relatively short poems that bring us into contact with a specific scientific concept, idea, theory, or field. The monthly feature "Meter" in Scientific American will be the main source.
• Use of YouTube videos (some via How Scientists Know) to illuminate the central theme of the literary work, and to deepen the students' knowledge of the field of science from which the theme comes.
• tentative offering date: Fall Term 2021
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