Senor Parrot's Perch

Here’s a sad commentary about our national teaching pool. KansasCity.com reports about the poor demand for teaching jobs in the Kansas City area. It’s common to see 100 applicants for each job. That’s an average though, and apparently there is quite a variation in the number of applicants depending upon the area of specialization.  Sciences, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) subjects,  Special Education,and Foreign Languages get 10 to 50 applicants per opening. Half of the 190 open teaching positions are in those areas.

Still, isn’t that an adequate number of applicants to fill those positions with qualified teachers? Reading between the lines, you wonder just how qualified are the applicants for those STEM, special education and foreign languages positions, that the jobs should go unfilled. Yesterday I wrote about the task Don Mugan has taken on, up in North Dakota. His goal is to train the teachers that the school districts already have in how to teach the core STEM subjects. A good STEM project for our universities would be to clone Don and put a few of his clones in every school district in the country.

Ever been burned by some junky, cheap telescope or microscope? I have. There it was, in the store, a great price, and you could see the excitement in your kid’s face as he or she pulled it out of the box and set it up outside. Then after you brought it home, and you watched with anticipaiton as your kid tore open the box and set it up, it turned out to be so poorly made or the optics were so awful it was unusable?�

So how can I find something that isn’t junk that really does open a window into the universe? Now, help is here, at least for telescopes. Telescopes 101,��over at Spaceref.com,�is a great place to start learning about choosing a telescope. I stumbled on it in an add on a news site I was reading this morning.

The first thing they point out is that magnifaction is not the most important feature. Apparently this is where �newbies like myself are usually fooled.

So what is is important? It’s�Aperture (or objective). This is the fancy name for width of the lense. It can be measured in inches or centimeters and generally, the wider, the better.

Why is aperture so important? The wider the lense, the more light that the telescope gathers, and the more light it gathers, the clearer and more detailed the image you can see.

The article goes on to clearly show the differences between three types of telescopes, in diagrams and in their relative advantages and disadvantages. The diagrams are excellent.

So, with summer coming soon, get ready to read the skies. If your community is anything like mine (Madison, WI), then you’ll also have plenty of opportunities to connect with groups of amatuer astronomers, and maybe even a few pros, to get acquainted with our neighbors in the galaxy.

Last summer my family joined a group led by some graduate students from the University of Wisconsin. Out in a park, on the edge of town, armed with a telescope, they had us looking at passing satallites, planets and constellations. They even told us the stories and myths of these constellations from various cultures. The favorites were the from the North American Indians, which were often quite funny.

A few other good links:

• I bought my telescope. Now what?
• So you want to buy a telescope … �Advice for Beginners
  
• Telescopes for Beginners in Astronomy