New Blogger: Starting Teaching

So, I've recently started a new faculty position and I'd like to get back into some sort of blogging. Enter the New Math Blogger Initiative! Now, I'm not exactly a math blogger, but I think teaching physics will have similar features - especially after my conversation with some of the new math faculty at my institution.

I'm going to shortly answer two of the blog prompts this week:

Where does the name of your blog originate? Why did you choose that? (Bonus follow up: Why did you decide to blog?)

My blog address I addressed in one of my first posts: Making Science, along with some thoughts about why I originally started blogging. The title of my blog, "I will do science to it," was inspired by the webcomic Dresden Codak - specifically the one that inspired this shirt - so I should credit that! The webcomic is full of neat science fiction, a bit of philosophy, and other such delights, and I occasionally identify with the protagonist despite a much more normal and stable upbringing.

If you are a new teacher, what are two specific things you plan on doing this year?

The course I will teach this year is Introduction to Astronomy, and I am incredibly lucky in being able to build off and alongside an experienced faculty member who is teaching the course again this semester and sharing notes. This means I get to incorporate all sorts of things like pre/post conceptual tests to measure the course impact on student learning, lecture tutorials, paper clickers, without the overhead of developing the material for the course myself. My goal, though, is to make it my own. To make this specific for myself, I'll break it in to two goals. 

First, I want to be able to clearly justify each form of class activity and explain to students how we know it will help them learn, especially for the activities that will take extra effort on their part.  I'm reading a great book on Learner-Centered Astronomy Teaching, Strategies for Astro 101, which has tons of explanations of this sort of thing.

Second, I want to actually walk the walk about learning goals that are required by the university policies. Also spurred by the book mentioned above, this is a general pattern I'm trying to implement: In both reasearch and teaching, I'm trying to take things that might be considered "overhead" (e.g. grant-writing in research) seriously as an opportunity to improve my understanding of the work and build long-term effective project management. So I want to link activities to learning goals, with serious reflection rather than a vague "close enough" (which, I have already found, is tempting). This may be over-ambitious for my first semester teaching. So let me consider this successful if I make a link for at least one thing each class.