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You don’t have to like things to understand them… This includes Climate Change

Pamela L. Gay, Ph.D.
4 min readSep 13, 2022

Back when I was a professor, I loved to teach freshmen physics, either calc- or algebra-based. Kinematics is totally my jam. Optics is amazing and lets you do magic with things like optical tweezers. And thermo — I would teach thermo with food, and students would leave class understanding why you cook dumplings and other things in water and not in creamy broths. Most of Physics I and II is fun and games with science to me. I’m also a weirdo and I get that not everyone feels that way. And that is ok. I, for one, hate hate hate circuit diagrams. My brain has determined all circuit diagrams look like so many dead spiders, and while I can solve circuit diagrams, my brain likes to scream its displeasure at me the entire time. And here is the important thing: while I would really rather not solve circuit diagrams, I totally can solve circuit diagrams.

Photo by Mike Erskine on Unsplash

And I made sure my students knew I hated circuits but still knew how to do it. I really wanted them to all learn the lesson that there are a lot of things in life that we need to take the time to learn even if we don’t want to or don’t enjoy it.

We live in a world where a lot of people — myself included sometimes — get our bite-sized information in 280 character, highly-processed formats, optimized for easy consumption. This format removes…

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Pamela L. Gay, Ph.D.
Pamela L. Gay, Ph.D.

Written by Pamela L. Gay, Ph.D.

Astronomer, technologist, & creative focused on using new media to engage people in learning and doing science. Opinions & typos my own.

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