Intergalactic Education Revisited

Teachers often select young students to be the sun and planets. The student sun stands in the middle while the teacher helps students playing (and maybe dressed as) Mercury, Venus, Earth,  Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune walk in elliptical orbits around the sun. A moon also can be chosen to walk around Earth. Between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, students can play roles as rocks in the asteroid belt that some scientists think might be the remains of a planet that exploded in the solar system. (And, of course, there is the fear that one of the large rocks from the asteroid belt might hit Earth and destroy life here.) There is much more to the universe.

    Sometime later in a student's education a teacher, or shows with Carl Sagan or someone like him, may mention Earth is part of a solar system located on one side of the Milky Way galaxy, which is filled with other planets and billions of stars in fixed positions. Like our sun, some stars have two or more planets that might sustain extraterrestrial life. Some stars are brighter than others and some have different colors depending if they are dying or just developing. The universe is filled with a spectrum of light not visible with the naked eye.

     The Milky Way is not the only galaxy in the universe; the Andromeda galaxy is the biggest one closest to the Milky Way. At some places on Earth that are free of man-made lights, it's possible to see the stars in the Milky Way and the entire Andromeda galaxy spiral. A black hole that sucks up light seems to be located near the center of galaxies where it might hold galaxies together like the sun's gravity attracts the planets. When galaxies crash into each other, they seem to send ripples throughout the universe.

    Beyond their solar system, students have much to research about the universe and many ways to demonstrate what they have learned. Perhaps a Milky Way of students dressed as different colored stars could surround student stars holding a large black garbage bag representing a black hole. The rotating solar system students would be positioned on one side among the stars. Classrooms could even act as separate galaxies, bump into each other in the hall, and set off a kind of wave like that performed by spectators at a ball game.

   

   

Must Someone Look Just Like You?

I heard a woman telling a friend she didn't know much about those running for school board positions in the coming election. In response, the friend said, "Just vote for the women." Such advice rings sort of hollow at a time when DNA research finds, unless DNA shows someone is an intergalactic alien with six arms, less than one percent of a person's DNA makes him or her different from everyone else. We might as well vote for anyone.

     Nkechi Okoro Carroll, a black female TV writer and showrunner at the CW network, reminded TV studios they cannot expect one African American to convey the perspective of all blacks. She herself grew up in Nigeria and the Ivory Coast and attended an English boarding school. She knows nothing about the hood.

     When I was growing up in Chicago, I asked my mother why there were no black sales clerks at Marshall Fields. She said the store didn't think white customers would buy anything from people who didn't look like them. For a long time, the same thinking, or lack thereof, prevented older, white managers from hiring young, professional women to sell the advertising, copiers, pharmaceuticals, insurance, and everything else they sell today.

     The point is, you can't tell a book by its cover and you can't tell those who have something valuable to share by the color of their skin. Stereotypes make it easy to assume we have nothing in common with teachers, characters in books, police officers, politicians, and anyone else who doesn't look like us and we have everything in common with those who look the same as us. Reality suggests more careful discernment pays off when it comes to human relationships.