Welcome to Astronomy 1

I am Dale Fields, your instructor for this semester.  Here is the tl;dr: I am here to help you gain in power.  That power comes from your better understanding of, well, The Everything, but that power also comes from inside of you.  You are going to further develop your skills at figuring out what is really going on.  One of those the skills is called science and the other is called metacognition.  These skills are going to be yours, they can never be taken away from you, and if you practice them then you won't need me by the end of the semester because you'll be able to figure out by yourself.

This is going to be a tough class, and back when this was face-to-face, I'd tell everyone that this could be the toughest class you take at Pierce.  That's because we're going to learn about The Everything (and it turns out that is a lot of stuff to remember) and we are simultaneously going to be practicing our skills with figuring stuff out with facts (we call this science) and we are going to become more aware of how our own brain works (we call this metacognition).  That is a LOT of stuff to do in one little course.  To help out, you are going to have a lot of support.  I'm going to have my Come See Me zoom hours each and every week so you can find me and demand answers.  I say "demand" because you are spending money to be here.  You are spending hours every week on this class.  It is my job to be here and help you through it.  If you hit a roadblock and stop your progress, I've done something wrong.  And so as your instructor I need to be here to help you get moving forward again.  We also have many tutors here to assist you.  These are students who have taken the class, who know what I'm looking for.  They are experts in this course, and I'm happy to have them here.  So as tough as this class is, people have your back and success in this class IS achievable.

Now lets look at some of the further details for this course.

Our Behaviour

Money, Grades, and Assignments 

More Stuff that Can Help

Goals of the Course

Ways to Contact Me

And here is something that is important enough it belongs on the front page.  I am a person born to a LOT of privilege.  While I am queer, I present as masculine and I have WASP heritage.  As much as I might want to, I'm not going to be able to understand the life experiences that most of you have.  I'm not going to ask you to trust me as you are going to be the only person that gets to make that decision.  People only get better with feedback, but I know that a LOT of European Americans get super-defensive at best and violent at worst when people are brave enough to provide that feedback.  As the person who records your grade, there is a massive power differential between us.  To try and make it safer for you to give me feedback, I have partnered with another professor to be my "accountabilibuddy".  Dr. Shannon DeVaney is a life science professor and the strongest ally I know at Pierce.  She has provided free food for any student at Pierce for years.  She helped start a program at Pierce to help our European American faculty realize how they are contributing to white supremacy (and to try and knock some sense into them).  If you have feedback about me, you can send it to her, and she will pass along the feedback but make sure that it is anonymous.  Without your consent, I will not find out who is telling her what.  Her e-mail is devanesc@piercecollege.edu.