Hughes Pack

I love teaching Observational Astronomy; when the kids come in, they’re curious about the sky but haven’t spent much time observing it. In one class we had the telescope out and were looking at Saturn. The quarterback of the football team—a guy everybody admired—looked through the eyepiece and said, “Wow, that’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life!” From that point on, the whole class was hooked.

 

One of my pet projects is what’s called a Near-Earth Object (NEO) search. NEOs are asteroids orbiting the earth; some are potentially hazardous and might hit earth in the future, so astronomers watch the skies to try to identify them. My astronomy classes have participated in those searches and discovered several asteroids. It’s a great project because we’re making a true contribution to science.

 

My newest interest is solar electricity. In spring ’09 a group of science club kids and I built a solar electric car from a kit. The kids loved doing it, and now the school has a street-legal car that goes 25 miles an hour. At graduation, one of the science club students handed me a check for $500 from his father, who wanted to support the project in the future because it was such an amazing experience for his son.

 

I spend a lot of my summers attending conferences and workshops—many times, I’m presenting at them. In 1991 I worked with international physicists at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab in California, then went to Hawaii to study a total solar eclipse. I learned more about doing science during those eight weeks than I had in 15 years. Then I got involved in the Hands-On Universe project [www.handsonuniverse.org/] and presented at workshops all around the world for 15 years. Through all this, I’ve found an overwhelming number of resources to use in teaching.

 

My personal interests increasingly involve the outdoors. I’ve become very interested in kayaking, and I teach mountain biking and recreational road riding. One of the things I love about our program is that we take students who’ve never ridden a mountain bike before, get them on the trails, and by the end of the term, they’re riding downhill and jumping logs. Recreational road riding is the same thing: we have kids who can’t even bike two miles, and by the end they’re accomplished riders who can go 10 to 20 miles at a time. It’s a great thing to take young people who’ve never done something like that before and make them realize they can do it.